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“... The fight over the new Ulysses, like all academic arguments over commas, is a fight between two ideas of human nature, two visions of judgment, two images of eternity*. On one side of the textual arena Hans Walter Gabler offers an ‘ideal text’ from which all error, especially the author’s, has been burned away in the refining fire of bibliographical theory ...”

“... Old Glory – the book written by Jonathan Raban – is an altogether different book from the Old Glory that was praised in the reviews, but it is no less wonderful for that. The book the reviewers wrote about does not exist at all, except as the ghost of an intention. This phantasmal Old Glory is the book which Raban originally planned to write, and which he expected would be little more than an elegant travel diary: the record of a passive drifting journey down the Mississippi in the track of Huckleberry Finn ...”

“... He prefers to enlarge the canon, and makes an exemplary case for a difficult outsider like Edward Upward, still loyal to the romantic communism of his youth, still a witness against the murderous power of the state. He has less patience with the Post-Modernists and their fantasy that we live at the end of an era when canons and coherences were possible ...”

“... Christopher Butler’s survey of post-war literature, music and painting maintains a judicious critical distance from its subject. Readers who wish a more direct report from the front lines of the avant-garde should consult a new anthology, Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies, edited by Jean Dupuy.* This documents the work of almost two hundred avant-gardists from Europe and America who displayed their most advanced work at a gallery in New York and wrote explanatory statements for inclusion in the book ...”

“... That is the way things happen,’ Auden writes in ‘Memorial for the City’, a poem Edward Mendelson dates from June 1949,                           for ever and everPlum-blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall coversThe cries of the whipped and the sighs of the loversAnd the hard bright light composesA meaningless moment into an eternal factWhich a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile:One enjoys glory, one endures shame;He may, she must ...”

“... and an important feature of his view of life; but he was seriously ‘unsettled’, as Edward Mendelson says, and had acquired ‘a profound new sense of menace and dread’.He had become professor of poetry at Oxford in 1956, although he was still mainly living in New York, and in 1958 he had shifted his summer residence from Ischia to a ...”

“... volumes of prose are provided. In 1972 Auden had largely entrusted the selection of the pieces to Edward Mendelson, then a young English professor at Yale, thus launching him on a series of heroic editorial tasks which, 43 years later, is still not finished. As an editor, Mendelson is meticulous, judicious and quite ...”

“... flow, whether from prose to poem, or poem to prose (a problem that will undoubtedly be solved when Edward Mendelson concludes his uniform edition of Auden’s complete works with a fully appendixed and noted Collected Poems). In an article in September 1932, for example, Auden can be found moaning about ‘the system’ and the fact that ‘no one can ...”

“... appears to possess a special being and authority. Greif moves nimbly from Being and Nothingness to Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at MoMA and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet his way of weaving a network of resemblances and discontinuities together, along with his evident gift for paraphrase and summary, might lead the reader to ...”

“... Auden said in an interview a few months before he died. Thanks to the magnificent efforts of Edward Mendelson, it’s now all here: prose, plays, libretti and, finally, the poems, coming to just over 7500 pages all told. Sizing up these volumes, one might take courage from a line in ‘The Labyrinth’: ‘Assume this maze has got a plan.’ Many ...”

“... Another important work was Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s strange book Out of Revolution, which Mendelson identifies as a formative influence on The Age of Anxiety. He read intensively, and mainly with his own intellectual needs in mind. Like many heavy readers he loved detective stories, but he took them seriously, prefixing to his essay ‘The Guilty ...”

“... it is not) an official biography, he has evidently depended on or even worked fairly closely with Edward Mendelson, perhaps Auden’s ‘scholar-in-chief’, his literary executor and the editor who worked directly according to his wishes. And yet legends afflict Mendelson’s work as well. After his edition of the ...”

“... academics,’ he says, though without explaining what they are envious of. He takes a swing at Edward Mendelson, the academic who is Auden’s executor, even though he found Mendelson helpful when writing his biography of the poet. The professor did not much like Osborne’s book when it appeared, and his judgment ...”

“... for example, that other lost play, The Fronny) reconstructed by the patient detective work of Edward Mendelson, repeatedly exemplify this association. The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), published here for the first time, ends with Robert Bicknell shooting his Spectre, a crime the village policeman greets with typical equanimity: Policeman: Ee’s ...”

“... very idiosyncratic account of Christian history, ‘tracing patterns unimaginable by others’, as Edward Mendelson remarks – a disparaging view the poet himself later accepted. Throughout the time he was working on The Age of Anxiety the tone of his thinking was rather bleakly religious. The poem is set on the night of All Souls, a feast of which the ...”