…. Or at least read the works you find on his syllabus.
This Tumbler blog has reproduced the syllabus he thought when he was a literature professor at the University of Michigan for the 1941–42 academic year. His course was named “Fate and the Individual in European Literature”. As you can see it is quite great in terms of size, as it contains more than six thousand pages of reading.
Now I guess this syllabus doesn’t actually executed completely in the class. It’s not humanly possible to read that much in three months or so. But this is a great selection of European (and American) literature and very great for someone who wants to cover the basics of their classics and I’m sure seeing Auden talk about this masterpieces would be an excellent experience.
So you can use this as a recommendation list.
How many of these books you have read ? (I assume you should listen to the music?) Ignore the Critical Reading Part, I’m sure better works are out today. I have read all except three (Rilke, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud).