Auden's early poetry carried strong social, political and economic overtones, reflecting an interest in the thought of Marx and Freud inherited from his father, but his later work was characterised by a greater interest in religious and spiritual issues.[115] The huge range of form, style and subject exhibited by his work, the variety of its outlook and its accessibility and emotional directness initially provoked scepticism amongst modernist critics who placed greater value on consistency and objectivity, but his reputation grew as modernist orthodoxy waned, and he has since increasingly come to be viewed as the first writer of the postmodern era.[116] By 2011 the American critic Edward Mendelson could write: "at the start of the twenty-first century Auden's stature had reached the point where many readers thought it not implausible to judge his work the greatest body of poetry in English of the previous hundred years or more".[116]