He held scrappy, apostate opinions: he liked Rimbaud, Kabuki, Looney Tunes, Ronald Firbank. Poulenc was better than Wagner; Auden was better than Yeats. These opinions, decanted from a complex personality that partook equally of passion and parody, were essentially a social tactic, a means of drawing a line between those who, like Ashbery and Gorey, were subtle or hip enough to hear all the tones and those who, like the poet Donald Hall, weren’t. (Hall and others on his side of the line were badly teased.)