Volume 28, Number 13 · August 13, 1981
The Gambler's Throw
By Stuart Hampshire
Early Auden
by Edward Mendelson
Viking, 407 pp., $20.00
Because Professor Mendelson is usually slow to praise and quick to criticize, this is not an altogether enjoyable book to read, although it is authoritative and it is an indispensable guide to its subject. He is not concerned with biography in the usual sense, but rather with the twists and turns of Auden's beliefs about the proper role of a poet and of a writer up until Auden's final departure for America in 1939. By full and careful quotation from poetry and prose, published and unpublished, Professor Mendelson has little difficulty in showing that Auden's beliefs about his own aims as a writer were constantly changing, and that at any one time up till 1939 his attitudes were liable to be confused and contradictory, and often also rather lightly held and superficial.
Review, 2085 words
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