High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! "In Praise of Limestone" is a poem written by W. H. Auden in Italy in May 1948. Central to his canon and one of Auden`s finest poems, it has been the subject of diverse scholarly interpretations. Auden`s limestone landscape has been interpreted as an allegory of Mediterranean civilization and of the human body. The poem, sui generis, is not easily classified. As a topographical poem, it describes a landscape and infuses it with meaning. It has been called the "first … postmodern pastoral". In a letter, Auden wrote of limestone and the poem`s theme that "that rock creates the only human landscape."