Volume 44, Number 6 · April 10, 1997
The Crack in the Teacup
By Bernard Knox
W.H. Auden: Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, Volume I, 1926-1938
edited by Edward Mendelson
Princeton University Press, 836 pp., $59.50
This new volume in the invaluable Complete Works of W.H. Auden edited by Edward Mendelson contains the original version of all the prose essays and reviews the poet wrote during the years he was living in England, as well as the original text of the two travel books in prose and verse in which he collaborated with Louis MacNeice (Letters from Iceland) and Christopher Isherwood (Journey to a War). It also contains a great deal of his verse: the long, witty Letter to Lord Byron in the Iceland book and the two sonnet sequences London to Hong Kong and In Time of War in the Isherwood book. Mendelson supplies a text newly edited from the manuscript where available, otherwise from the printed text 'reprinted with a minimum of regularization' from the first edition. Some 150 pages of appendices and textual notes deal with problems in the transmission and supply explanatory notes on allusions in the text. For anyone interested in 'early Auden' this book is indispensable.
Review, 2803 words
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