Product Description

This book contains all the essays and reviews that W. H. Auden wrote during the years when he was living in England, and also includes the full original versions of his two illustrated travel books, Letters from Iceland (written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice) and Journey to a War (written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood). Auden's early prose ranges from extravagant indiscreet travel diaries through sharply observed critiques of writers from John Skelton to Winston Churchill. It includes studies of Communism and Christianity; audaciously wide-ranging essays on literature, psychology, and politics; and writings about gossip, sex, prisons, and schools.

The editor's notes include explanations of contemporary and private allusions. The long "Last Will and Testament" written in verse by Auden and MacNeice, which Evelyn Waugh described as a "gossip column," is annotated in full. The book will interest not only Auden's many admirers, but everyone concerned with twentieth-century literature and culture.

About the series:

In 1928, Stephen Spender hand-printed thirty copies of a small volume of poems by his friend W. H. Auden--the first published book by a man who was to become the dominant literary figure of his generation and one of the century's greatest poets. Sixty years later, Princeton University Press inaugurated an edition of the complete works of Auden, which is intended to serve as the definitive text for all the works Auden published or intended to publish in the form in which he expected to see them printed: his plays and other drama, libretti, essays and reviews, and poems.

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden will provide a unique opportunity to solve the numerous textual problems connected with the severe revisions Auden made in his own works. The texts are newly edited from Auden's manuscripts by Edward Mendelson, the literary executor of the Auden estate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #689422 in Books
• Published on: 1997-02-03
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .3 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 952 pages

From Library Journal
This is the first volume in a new series on Auden that is striving to present the most accurate editions of his work. To that end, the publisher has based this text on original manuscripts that were edited by Mendelson, who is the literary executor of Auden's estate. This initial installment includes all the prose he wrote while living in England as well as the travel titles, Letters from Iceland and Journey to a War. This edition also sports numerous photographs and a scholarly introduction and notes.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Auden seems to be creeping back into contemporary consciousness, thanks partly to the recent work of biographers, memoirists, and now this volume in Princeton's series of his complete writings. Concentrating on the early prose but also including poetry inspired directly by his trips to Iceland and China, the compendium is staggering for its record of the writer's still-less-than-fashionable play of intelligence. Auden reveals himself here as first and last a maker who would approach almost any written form with that preoccupation. Short book reviews, radio talks, political reportage, campy vignettes, scathing send-ups of far-north culinary likes--Auden was just as good at describing the taste of Icelandic cured shark as he was at writing "In Defense of Gossip" or at proposing a reassessment of the poetry of Pope. Although his mind was steeped in tradition, Auden exhibited a remarkably free range within that tradition to elaborate, invent, or simply amuse himself. And in our era, when more poets seem to be writing prose now than once did, Auden's contributions also continue to show us how much further we have to go. Molly McQuade

Review
A rich mine of reading here for scholars and informed lay readers alike. . . . -- Library Journal

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

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, The Boston Book Review

For anyone interested in `early Auden' this book is indispensable. -- Bernard Knox, The New York Review of Books