Volume 12, Number 12 · June 19, 1969
Worldling
By Denis Donoghue
Secondary Worlds
by W.H. Auden
Random House, 144 pp., $4.95
Collected Longer Poems
by W.H. Auden
Random House, 356 pp., $7.50
Letters From Iceland
by W.H. Auden, by Louis MacNeice
Random House, 253 pp., $7.50 (revised edition)
Völuspá: The Song of the Sybil
translated by Paul B. Taylor, translated by W.H. Auden
Windhover Press 16 EPB, University of Iowa, n.p., $6.25
Quest for the Necessary: W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness
by Herbert Greenberg
Harvard University, 209 pp., $5.95
Auden's Poetry
by Justin Replogle
University of Washington, 258 pp., $6.95
In October, 1967, W. H. Auden gave the T. S. Eliot Lectures at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Propriety was abundantly fulfilled; Canterbury was the place of Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot College the first building of the new university, the lecturer Eliot's friend, a disciple, a poet hardly less accomplished than his master. In the first lecture Auden took up one of Eliot's themes, martyrdom, choosing for his texts Murder in the Cathedral and Charles Williams's Thomas Cranmer. In the second, he spoke of the Icelandic sagas, especially the Laxdaela saga, which describes the conversion of the hero Kjartan from paganism to Christianity. In the third, he discussed the nature of opera and described certain interesting problems which arose in his own work as librettist for The Rake's Progress, Elegy for Young Lovers, and The Bassarids. Finally, he returned to the great matter which he shared with Eliot: the relation between poetry and Christian belief, words and the Word.
Review, 2687 words
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