Impetigo

You don't really want to read about it but it's really by way of introduction.
I never go to the doctors unless I really have to but eventually one has to. If it had spread much further I'd have looked like Wystan Auden. While many people wouldn't mind looking like one of their heroes, I'd prefer it to be Emmanuelle Beart but the antibiotics should start to work soon, which reminds me, I'd better take some more. They are quite big tablets, like you might give a horse. After a week of taking those, I should be second favourite for next year's Derby.

I doughtily make progress with Prof. Mendelson's Early Auden. He's good and the duller parts are not his fault, they are Wystan's. He dutifully sets out all of Auden's pontificating and arcane theories about psychology, history, love and all in the long poems. Auden's great facility and compulsion to write were his own worst enemy. Surely it can't all be good. If poems won't suffice he makes diagrams and charts whereas, really, all of that gestalted into the great lyric poems would say as much, if not more.
However, Mendelson exceeds even his own very high standards on pp.203-209 in my paperback (the final pages of the chapter called The Great Divide). It's hardly for me to paraphrase it but, ha, so Modernism was still Romanticism after all.
Prof. Mendelson completely nails it, though, with,
Auden implicitly claimed a larger and less circumscribed purpose than 'poet' can signify after two centuries of romantic coloring,
'and his verse suggested that poetry falsifies' (which I'm less immediately concerned about).

I've long thought something like that but ne'er seen it so well expressed, that the idea of 'poet' since, say, Wordsworth, has been hijacked and ruined by the image of the aloof dreamer with their mind on higher things.
For sure, the famous portrait of John Donne has him posing as the distracted lover but his poems can't be accused of a lack of rigour. It is entirely due to those swooning types, contemporaries of Beethoven - but lacking his get out clause of music being abstract - that poets have since been largely regarded by everyone else as, in Inspector Grimm's phrase from The Thin Blue Line, 'hoity toity namby pamby wishy washy'.
You don't call the likes of Don Paterson that. 
And so it is, perhaps, that Auden began the long haul back. Larkin's common sense was a major contribution and poetry is probably mostly not like that any more but it's too late because most people don't bother with poetry and so don't know.
So I think I know why Larkin had 'Writer' put on his gravestone and why I couldn't be bothered to explain that when I was, or made myself out to be, a 'poet', okay, yes I was but not the sort of poet you are probably thinking of.