Culture
McDavid is hockey's superstar. Will a Stanley Cup finally elevate his status in America?
The 2024 Stanley Cup Final has the potential to be magical, and it’s largely because of Edmonton Oilers superstar Connor McDavid.
McDavid is the greatest player of his era. He’s at or near the zenith of his powers, and in his ninth season, he’s finally competing for his first NHL championship.
The Florida Panthers are the only thing left between him and the Stanley Cup.
“This year you’ve got the best player in the game, a player that can do things that other people can’t, and you have a series that I don’t think anybody thinks is a short series,” ESPN analyst and former NHLer Ray Ferraro said. “It’s really important and really cool that Connor gets to play in his first final.”
McDavid going for his first title should have the same intrigue as LeBron James’ first appearance in the NBA Finals. McDavid is hockey’s LeBron in terms of making good on his phenom potential.
Yet for all of McDavid’s impressive resume and impeccable skills, it doesn’t seem to stack up. In fact, McDavid’s first trip to the final might not even compare in the United States to Wayne Gretzky or Sidney Crosby reaching that stage.
“With Gretzky, you had a smaller league and the aftermath of the World Hockey Association — and then the merger. With Sidney Crosby, he played for a franchise that was either No. 1 or No. 2 in terms of regional television audiences in the United States on an annual basis,” said Tom Mayenknecht, a sports business commentator and host of the Sports Market. “Then there was the almost Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa-type bouncing back from the lost season. Crosby was part of that context (with Alex Ovechkin). He was a big hope to get people past that.
“And LeBron James was basketball. He had high-school hype.”
Mayenknecht said McDavid is still the most recognizable player across the NHL.
Hardcore hockey fans will be watching him in the Stanley Cup Final, and the McDavid narrative should be enough to interest casual fans.
Will it, though?
As McDavid prepares to play for the championship, viewers who rarely watch hockey need to understand what makes him so special.
“For the casual hockey fan clicking around on this Saturday night or during the series, we have to do a good job of making sure we introduce Connor McDavid … and not just assume that everybody knows everything there is to know about Connor McDavid,” ESPN senior vice president of production and remote events Mark Gross said.
Aside from perhaps Crosby, McDavid was the most-hyped prospect in the sport since Eric Lindros. Though Lindros’ brute strength made him a man playing amongst boys, McDavid’s sublime talent put him several cuts above his junior hockey peers.
McDavid was touted as one of the most graceful and fastest skaters ever before he even entered the NHL.
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There was never a question he’d be the No. 1 pick in the 2015 draft. Teams tanked, and tanked hard, to secure the best odds to land him.
When the Oilers won the draft lottery, moving up two spots to leapfrog Buffalo and Arizona, then-Sabres GM Tim Murray couldn’t hide his disappointment that he missed out on the chance to select McDavid.
Murray’s emotions have turned out to be justified. McDavid won the scoring title and league MVP in his second season. He’s won five Art Ross and three Hart trophies in his nine seasons. He’s already one of the greatest players ever — and he’s backed it up in the postseason.
His 1.58 playoff points per game over his career is the best production rate of anyone not named Gretzky or Mario Lemieux — whose best years were in hockey’s most offensive era. The goal he scored in the clinching game of the Western Conference final, where he made one of the NHL’s best defensemen, Miro Heiskanen, look foolish, was a thing of beauty.
“That should be on everywhere there’s an NHL highlight,” Ferraro said. “In the NHL, there is one player that can score that goal. There’s one player. That’s it. It’s special.”
McDavid is like a god in Edmonton — one of his nicknames is McJesus — and he’s one of the most well-known people in Canada.
That applies in the United States, too, to some extent.
“Any hockey fan in the U.S. who follows hockey closely knows who Connor McDavid is already,” Oilers CEO of hockey operations Jeff Jackson said. “I’ve had the chance to sit at MSG or in Tampa or other places, and you watch the crowd. They all get on the edge of their seat when he touches the puck just like they do in Edmonton.”
But those attending games are mostly hockey fans and usually hardcore ones at that. McDavid’s appeal in the United States beyond those invested in the sport isn’t remotely the same.
That McDavid plays in Edmonton, one of the smallest markets and the most-northern-based team in North American pro sports, doesn’t help.
“There’s no question that if he was playing in an American market that he’d be an even bigger name among American hockey fans and American sports fans,” Mayenknecht said.
The NFL and NBA can overcome the small-market issue. Some of football’s biggest stars over the years, such as Brett Favre, Peyton Manning and Patrick Mahomes, spent their primes in small markets but were the most marketable and recognizable players among casual fans. LeBron got his start and eventually won an NBA championship in Cleveland, and that didn’t hurt his status one bit.
“The National Hockey League still has a lot of work to do, in partnership with the PA (players’ association) and with its broadcast rightsholders,” Mayenknecht said. “There’s a lot more that can be done in terms of individual player marketing. But the league is better now than it was 30 years ago … but it’s still fourth among the big four (leagues).”
McDavid is from Newmarket, Ontario, which is just north of Toronto, Canada’s biggest city and the country’s financial hub. Turn on a Canadian sports channel and you’re likely to see him during a commercial block promoting all sorts of products and services.
Jackson was McDavid’s agent from the time the hockey phenom was 15 until he took his job with the Oilers last August. The one cross-border endorsement deal he secured for his client was with BetMGM, ads that also feature Gretzky.
McDavid’s deal with sports apparel giant Adidas meant he was considered for a massive marketing campaign with the biggest stars from across the globe. Adidas went in a different direction.
“They were great to work with. They were a great partner for Connor,” Jackson said. “We just didn’t get the wider use out of it.”
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Like baseball, hockey fandom is more regional, Mayenknecht said. He points to McDavid being outside the top five in terms of athlete recognition index among NHLers this season, according to Fanatics.
No. 1 is rookie Connor Bedard, who plays in big-market Chicago.
“Because of residency, Connor Bedard has an opportunity to rise above McDavid’s status — especially if he becomes part of a competitive team, a contender,” Mayenknecht said.
Television ratings are up this postseason, and McDavid’s exploits undoubtedly play into that. The Oilers captain has 31 points in 18 games to lead all scorers. However, two-thirds of the viewers in Games 1 through 3 of the Oilers’ last series against Dallas were in Canada.
Canadian audiences will be tuned in to the final as McDavid and the Oilers try to break a 31-year Stanley Cup drought by a Canadian-based team.
But that might not be enough to entice Americans, and the Panthers don’t have the same reach or broad appeal as the New York Rangers, the team they eliminated in the last round.
ESPN, the carrier of this year’s final, broadcast 11 Oilers games this season — including two on the main network and one on ABC. The league has also made a concerted effort to get McDavid in the spotlight.
An all-access, six-part Amazon series was announced Thursday, which features McDavid as one of the key players. It’ll be released in the fall.
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McDavid is also scheduled to appear on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Friday.
“We’re not looking to do something and force something on somebody that they’re not comfortable doing,” Gross said.
“It seems like there’s a willingness (from McDavid) that there hasn’t been before,” NHL senior executive vice president and chief content officer Steve Mayer said. “He gets it. This is his moment.”
McDavid, who entered the league as a shy and introverted teenager, has tried to open up a bit.
“I feel like I’m more comfortable in these environments and speaking my mind on a couple things,” McDavid said. “That being said, I’m still not the most outspoken guy. When I feel my voice can contribute, I’m not afraid to share it.”
McDavid has been on rules committees and helped revise the skills competition at the All-Star Game. The way he was continuously outspoken about the need for a best-on-best international hockey tournament helped move the needle toward getting the 4 Nations Face-Off planned for February 2025 and players back in the next Winter Olympics.
He’s also been willing to joke around in a media setting, which was most notably on display earlier this season when he cracked that he didn’t want to score anymore after he went 10 games without a goal. (That the Oilers had turned their season around after being tied for last place in the standings in early November, and he had 23 assists during that span, probably put him in a more jovial mood.)
“If you think about the pressure that’s on a young man coming in with the spotlight he had as a teenager and adapting into the league, it’s just like anything in life — you need to grow into it and be comfortable with it,” Jackson said. “I don’t think Connor liked being labeled as a superstar. He has a high degree of respect for the game. He wanted to earn it.
“What I’ve seen over the last two or three years is he’s comfortable being the face of the league. He’s grown into the role, and he’s handled it extremely well, especially considering the pressure that’s on him.”
McDavid is still only willing to pull back the curtain so much, though. Don’t expect him to be like LeBron holding court to talk about gun policies and the like.
“The political side of things I leave to the experts,” McDavid said. “I have nothing really to add on that stuff. I know hockey, and I know hockey well. I try to stick with it.”
That’s not unique to McDavid. Plenty of athletes aren’t comfortable going on the record about controversial topics.
“He lives in a fishbowl,” Ferraro said. “Everything he does is going to be scrutinized 100 different ways from Tuesday.”
Mayenknecht has offered media training to a few hundred high-level athletes, including Olympians and NHLers. He said there’s nothing worse than someone trying to feign interest in an issue or put on a facade.
“You can’t force someone to be anything other than themselves,” Mayenknecht said. “One of the worst things that can be done is to take a mild-mannered personality and try to make them a standup comedian. That won’t work.
“Connor McDavid is not an activist athlete in the way LeBron James is, but I’d argue there’s stuff that can be done to make up for that and connect him to fans.”
For his part, McDavid isn’t preoccupied with how playing in the Stanley Cup Final can grow his brand or increase his stardom in the United States.
“I couldn’t care less about that,” he said with a laugh. “I want to be part of a group that wins. That’s all I want to do.”
Nothing drives McDavid more than wanting to win, according to those who know him best.
Now, he has a chance to win something he’s dreamed about for years. People should be tuning in, even if their fan allegiances aren’t with the Oilers.
“If you have no skin in the game, why are you going to watch?” Ferraro said. “McDavid is the hook because he’s the best player in the game.”
McDavid has always preferred to let his play on the ice speak for him. He’ll likely have something special in store in this series.
“For those fans who only see him in Instagram highlights or on ‘SportsCenter’ in the U.S., they’re going to appreciate the completeness of his game,” Jackson said. “He scores goals you shake your head at. But when you watch him live, you’ll see a player who competes extremely hard on every shift, plays good defense and wins puck battles that help you win.”
If he’s at his best, there’s a strong chance that’ll put the Oilers over the top. And if that happens, there’s no doubt he’ll become a bigger star in the United States.
“Casual sports fans are the ones who drive this train,” Mayenknecht said. “It’s not the hardcore. It’s when you get into converting and having awareness among casual fans, like Gretzky created in Los Angeles, that things turn around.
“Connor McDavid winning a Stanley Cup in 2024 will certainly make him that much more recognizable, that much more appreciated, in 2025 and beyond.”
— The Athletic’s Michael Russo contributed to this report.
(Top illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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