 Mendelson , Auden 's biographer , summarises the response to " In Praise of Limestone " in the years following its publication : " Readers found the poem memorable … but even the critics who praised it did not pretend to understand it . Those who , without quite knowing why , felt grateful to it were perhaps responding to its secret , <unk> defense of a part of themselves that almost everything else written in their century was teaching them to discredit or deny . " 
