This mammoth, accessible study ties the life of major English poet W.H. Auden to his ideas, and both to his poetry. Mendelson--a Columbia University professor who is also Auden's literary executor--picks up where his Early Auden left off, in 1939, when Auden emigrated to the United States. He sees in Auden two kinds of poetry, which he calls "myth" and "parable." The first stresses the impersonal and the aesthetic; the second, the voluntary and the ethical. Auden's best poems represent or acknowledge both; his weaker work adheres to one or the other. This intriguing interpretive scheme gets necessarily submerged as Mendelson tracks Auden's voluminous output, his life and his rapidly-shifting ideas. Throughout his writing life Auden's deepest beliefs changed frequently, sometimes faster than he could finish the poems he meant to embody them. (Some beliefs were strange indeed: in 1940 Auden thought that he had been granted true love--in the form of longtime companion Chester Kallman--as a reward for his childhood attachment to lead-mining machinery.) Most usefully, Mendelson has read what Auden read, finding in now-neglected thinkers (Charles Williams, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, R.G. Collingwood, F.J.E. Raby and Owen Barfield) the seeds of this omnivorous and idiosyncratic poet's changes. Auden's successive reversals and self-repudiations can be dizzying; Mendelson's clear prose and copious citations do their best to help readers hang on. His focus on Auden's long poems and his defense of Auden's very late "domestic" poems will send many readers back to them. And the poet's own amply quoted manuscripts will give most readers one more source of pleasure: "You're so good," he tells one intimate, "and I'm a neurotic middle-aged butterball." (Apr.) FYI: John Fuller's W.H. Auden: A Commentary, published last year, is an exhaustive reader's companion to Auden's work.
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For anyone interested in 'early Auden' this book is indispensable. -- Bernard Knox, New York Review of Books
We need Auden again, sacred and profane. As the New Age lunges into the volcano, we could do worse than read the Auden of the '30s, if only to prepare us to understand, and value, the later Audens .. . .
The Complete Works, edited with elegant scruple by Auden's literary executor Edward Mendelson is . . . the only way to get at Auden as he happened, year by year, bit by bit, and not as he, or his later biographers, want us to think of him. -- Tom D'Evelyn, Boston Book Review
Before famously (and more or less permanently) emigrating to New York in 1939, W. H. Auden was not only the foremost English poet of his generation but also a prolific reviewer and essayist whose tastes and political sensibilities dominated the anti-fascist England of the 1930s. . . . This essential volume in a projected complete edition restores the voracious reader and never pedantic critic to the master poet. -- Publisher's Weekly
The collection, which can be dipped into as well as read as a whole, is a feast of language and insight, and a brilliant, if indirect, cultural history of the World War II period as well as an often prophetic look at our own. -- Arthur Kirsch, Washington Post Book World
To have found and contextualized the material collected in this second volume of Auden's prose is a magnificent achievement, and Edward Mendelson's immaculately handled edition will be a scholarly resource of a permanent kind. -- Peter MacDonald, Times Literary Supplement
At last, we have a big book in which we can step into the quarry of ideas, good and bad, from which [Auden] mined [his] poems. . . . The essays are overwhelming in the number and variety of the subjects addressed, ideas aired, capital letters employed, and systems invented to prove a small point. . . . The essays are also a reminder of how many more places a poet could work out his worries in public fifty years ago. . . . If he sometimes sounds in the forties as if he were speaking to us from a very high soapbox in a very big square, well, listen: we can hear him, still. -- Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
To read a mere decade's worth of Auden's essays, reviews, articles and miscellaneous musings is to be reminded that the best English poet of the 20th century was one of its brightest commentators. His range of interests was incomparably wide, his manner generally clear and always insightful, his curiosity unflagging. -- Glyn Maxwell, The Guardian
Auden's range of topics is impressively, even dizzyingly broad. . . . Auden did not sacrifice depth; numerous pieces are reflective, analytic, and otherwise carefully developed, and few of the pieces seem dated. . . . Like its predecessors, the book is the model of an intelligently edited compilation. -- Choice
Auden displays the capacious intellect, wide-ranging sympathies, and unfaltering brilliance that make him one of the most admired writers of the 20th century. Mendelson's meticulously edited collection will be a delight for all who relish the work of this massive, mid-century mind. -- Virginia Quarterly Review
