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 5Show More 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 1Show More Show More“... You really cannot tell fully about a thing until the man’s work is all there,’ 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 ...”