Cool Vertigo
Matthew Bevis: Auden Country, 2 March 2023
The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Poems, Vol. I: 1927-39
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 848 pp., £48, August 2022,978 0 691 21929 5 Show More
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 848 pp., £48, August 2022,
The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Poems, Vol. II: 1940-73
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 1120 pp., £48, August 2022,978 0 691 21930 1 Show More
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 1120 pp., £48, August 2022,
“... of foreboding or foreknowledge in the poetry is gainsaid by the line-by-line surprises as you read it – as you move, say, from a ‘cigarette-end smouldering on a border’ to the ‘plate-glass windows of the Sport Hotel’ to the ‘strangled orchards’ to ‘the infected sinus, and the eyes of stoats’. These words all come from ‘Consider This ... ”