To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion.

Auden’s lines suggest the way a prominent figure—especially a public intellectual, artist, or political leader—can cease to be encountered as an individual and instead become an atmosphere: a set of assumptions, attitudes, and arguments that others breathe in and argue within. The “whole climate of opinion” implies influence that is diffuse and impersonal, shaping discourse even when the person is absent or dead. The phrasing also hints at the flattening effect of reputation: posterity may convert a complex human being into a symbolic position in debates, a shorthand for a worldview. The couplet’s cool, almost reportorial tone underscores that this transformation is social and collective (“To us”), not merely personal.