Auden on Austen

With his usual critical insight, Auden captured Austen’s knowingness in a poem about Byron:

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass,’
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.