Forty years ago when I was in my first year as a teacher at Wheaton College, the English department held its annual writing and literature conference.

It was always in the fall.

And the featured speaker at this particular edition of the conference was Cleanth Brooks, the great, the founder or one of the founders of the New Criticism, one of the most influential literary critics of the 20th century.

He was an emeritus professor at Yale at this point.

He had taught at Yale for 40 years, but before that he had taught at Louisiana State University and he was a southerner.

He was a man from East Tennessee and one of the most notable things about him was how rich and deep and thick his southern accent was.

Terry, my wife, came up to him after his talk and asked, how is it that you still sound this way after so many years in the north?

I think she was worried about losing her southern accent with our living in northern Illinois.

He, by the way, explained that he was a terrible mimic.

He could not mimic anybody else’s voice or anybody else’s way of speaking.

He couldn’t do it consciously and so therefore he couldn’t do it unconsciously.

That was his explanation.

But his talk, which was on modern poetry, a very common thing for him to talk about, featured a reflection on part of Auden’s Christmas Oratorio for the time being, which I edited for the Princeton Auden Critical Editions series about a decade ago.

In the middle of the oratorio, there is what Auden calls a fugal chorus.

He had actually, when he wrote it, thought that Benjamin Britten, his friend, might be able to set it to music, but Britten pointed out that with it being seven stanzas long, it was about 50 times bigger than it should be.

If you were going to have a fugal chorus, you needed about two lines, not a whole bunch.

The fugal chorus is a song in praise of Caesar.

This is, of course, Auden’s reflection on modernity.

He’s really sort of using Caesar as a kind of name for modern technocratic, bureaucratic administration.

And he’s talking about all the things that Caesar has achieved, all the kingdoms he has conquered.

And he’s actually talking about mathematics and biology and economics, but he disguises it in this traditional form.

And each of the stanzas begins, great is Caesar, he has conquered seven kingdoms.

And each stanza ends, great is Caesar, God must be with him.

And Cleanth Brooks read the entire fugal chorus, and to this day, I cannot read that poem without hearing it in his voice.

It’s actually become a kind of a joke around the house.

So I will walk around the house saying to myself, great is Caesar, God must be with him.

That’s what the poem sounds like to me.

It doesn’t sound like Auden.

It doesn’t sound like me.

It sounds like Cleanth Brooks saying, great is Caesar, God must be with him.