Abstract
McClay talks about an undergraduate course of staggering intellectual scope created by poet W.H. Auden in the fall of 1941. Fate and the Individual in European Literature, as it was titled, is not anything Auden is known for. Seventy-one years after Fate and the Individual in European Literature came and went, a faded, marked-up copy of Auden's original one-page syllabus was posted online by the literary scholar Alan Jacobs of Baylor University. Soon an image of that copy was circulating far and wide on the Internet, eliciting a surprising amount of commentary. Scholars and writers were excited by the syllabus, originally uncovered by Auden's literary executor Edward Mendelson, because it provided them with a list of texts that Auden himself, one of the greatest poets and critics of the twentieth century, considered central to the Western intellectual and literary tradition. It was like a guided tour of the essential furnishings of a great poet's mind.