Synopses & Reviews
This fifth volume of W. H. Auden's prose displays a great writer's mind in its full maturity of wisdom, learning, and emotional and moral intelligence. It contains his most personally revealing essays, the ones in which he wrote for the first time about the full history of his family life, his sexuality, and the development of his moral and religious beliefs. Among these works are the lightly disguised autobiographies that appear in long essays on the Protestant mystics and on Shakespeare's sonnets. The book also features the full text of his T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures,
Secondary Worlds, and many unpublished or unavailable lectures and speeches.
Edward Mendelson's introduction and comprehensive notes provide biographical and historical explanations of obscure references. The text includes corrections and revisions that Auden marked in personal copies of his work and that are published here for the first time.
Review
Praise for previous volumes: "The articles will delight any reader with their wit, charm, and elegance."--Charles Rosen, New York Review of Books
Review
Praise for previous volumes: "When you add in the volumes already devoted to plays, libretti, poems, it becomes hard to avoid describing the whole enterprise as heroic. In fact it could also be described as unique, for no other twentieth-century English poet has been so fully and patiently honoured."--Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
Review
Praise for previous volumes: "No major writer's complete works are more fun to read."--Publishers Weekly
Review
Praise for previous volumes: "A feast of language and insight."--Arthur Kirsch, Washington Post Book World
Review
Praise for previous volumes: "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
Review
Praise for previous volumes: "No major writers complete works are more fun to read."--Publishers Weekly
Review
"Mendelson's editions of Auden's works are among the great achievements of modern literary scholarship and his introduction here is a masterpiece of the editor's tactful art, guiding readers through the heaped documents to those where the poet writes most significantly. . . about himself and his work."--Jeremy Noel-Tod, Literary Review
Review
"No one could take [Auden] for anything less than an extremely accomplished, fluent, professional writer . . . As an editor, Mendelson is meticulous, judicious and quite extraordinarily thorough. To say that Princeton University Press, in producing such handsome and usable volumes, has matched Mendelson's editorial standards is to give high praise indeed."--Stefan Collini, London Review of Books
Review
"[B]eautiful."--Jon Sweeney, The Tablet
Synopsis
The penultimate volume of the complete prose of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century
This fifth volume of W. H. Auden's prose displays a great writer's mind in its full maturity of wisdom, learning, and emotional and moral intelligence. It contains his most personally revealing essays, the ones in which he wrote for the first time about the full history of his family life, his sexuality, and the development of his moral and religious beliefs. Among these works are the lightly disguised autobiographies that appear in long essays on the Protestant mystics and on Shakespeare's sonnets. The book also features the full text of his T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, Secondary Worlds, and many unpublished or unavailable lectures and speeches.
Edward Mendelson's introduction and comprehensive notes provide biographical and historical explanations of obscure references. The text includes corrections and revisions that Auden marked in personal copies of his work and that are published here for the first time.
About the Author
Edward Mendelson is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His books include Early Auden, Later Auden, The Things That Matter, and Lives of the New York Intellectuals.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction xiii
The Text of This Edition xli
ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, 1963-1966
Foreword to The Plough and the Pen 3
Telling Tales 5
Adam as a Welshman 11
Beyond Politics 15
An Improbable Life 19
Introduction to The Art of Eating, by M. F. K. Fisher 37
Introduction to The Protestant Mystics 42
[To Benjamin Britten on His Fiftieth Birthday] 65
Louis MacNeice 66
Louis MacNeice: A Memorial Address 69
A Symposium on W. H. Auden's "A Change of Air" 73
Foreword to W. H. Auden: A Bibliography, by B. C. Bloomfield 78
Introduction to Selected Poems, by Louis MacNeice 80
Foreword to Markings, by Dag Hammarskjöld 81
Introduction to The Sonnets, by William Shakespeare 92
Speaking of Books 109
Private Poet 112
A Short Defense of Poetry 117
Preface to The Tree and the Master 120
T. S. Eliot, O.M.: A Tribute 122
Behaviour, Action and Enchantment 124
President's Address 132
As It Seemed to Us 134
The Corruption of Innocent Neutrons 160
Mozart in the Stacks 164
A Word from W. H. Auden 165
One of the Family 166
Books of the Year: A Personal Choice 178
Introduction to Nineteenth-Century British Minor Poets 179
Foreword to Antiworlds, by Andrei Voznesensky 185
Introduction to Selected Poetry and Prose, by George Gordon, Lord Byron 187
Noah Greenberg (1909-1966) 201
Heresies 202
Nowness and Permanence 209
The Fall of Rome 214
The Worship of God in a Secular