Volume 55, Number 18 · November 20, 2008
What Happened to Wystan Auden?
By Charles Rosen
The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume III: 1949–1955
edited by Edward Mendelson
Princeton University Press, 779 pp., $49.50
Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden
edited by Stephen Burt with Hannah Brooks-Motl
Columbia University Press, 178 pp., $39.50
At the age of thirty-one, Wystan Hugh Auden, the major British poet between A.E. Housman and Philip Larkin (with a range of styles, techniques, forms, and themes far greater than either's), left England to settle in New York until a year before his death. Other poets of the twentieth century had chosen life abroad, notably T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but they quit their native land early in their twenties at the beginning of their careers. When Auden went into a self-imposed exile in 1939, he had already achieved a firmly established and distinguished position as poet and essayist. His literary executor (and editor of the critical edition of his complete works) Edward Mendelson has remarked, 'No English poet since Byron achieved fame as quickly as Auden did.' The new volume of the critical edition, Prose, Volume III, contains the prose writings from 1949 to 1955 that followed after Auden's first ten years in America.
Review, 4389 words
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