Volume 20, Number 12 · July 19, 1973
Good Grief
By Denis Donoghue
Epistle to a Godson, and Other Poems
by W.H. Auden
Random House, 77 pp., $5.00
Forewords and Afterwords
by W.H. Auden, selected by Edward Mendelson
Random House, 529 pp., $12.50
Man's Place: An Essay on Auden
by Richard Johnson
Cornell, 251 pp., $11.50
W.H. Auden as a Social Poet
by Frederick Buell
Cornell, 196 pp., $8.75
'For Valéry,' W. H. Auden has remarked, 'a poem ought to be a festival of the intellect, that is, a game, but a solemn, ordered, and significant game, and a poet is someone to whom arbitrary difficulties suggest ideas.' For Valéry, and now for Mr. Auden, especially in About the House, City Without Walls, and Epistle to a Godson, books written according to the principle that, whatever life is, poetry is a carnival. The poet begins with language, delighting in the exercise of its possibilities, and he stops short of Mardi gras only by requiring his language to recognize the existence of the primary world in which we live.
Review, 2826 words
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