A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
— W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose: Volume II. 1939-1948
In addition to his own verse, Auden translated a number of works into English, including the Mozart libretti The Magic Flute and Don Giovani. For Auden, opera libretti sat firmly with the European poetic tradition.