Volume 51, Number 10 · June 10, 2004
Auden Remakes 'The Tempest'!
By Mark Ford
The Sea and the Mirror:A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest
by W.H. Auden, edited by Arthur Kirsch
Princeton University Press, 106 pp., $24.95
The Sea and the Mirror is the most brilliant and unsettling of the four long poems Auden composed during his furiously industrious first decade in America.[1] It was begun in October of 1942 in the wake of a period of extreme turbulence and distress; and although the sequence is modestly subtitled 'A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest,' the poems—and prose—Auden puts into the mouths of the characters Prospero, Miranda, Caliban and co. reflect with exquisite subtlety and intelligence many recent, and longstanding, inner conflicts and guilts.
Review, 5572 words
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