W. H. Auden: The Sea and the Mirror (1944 / 2003)
W. H. Auden: The Age of Anxiety (1948 / 2011)
W. H. Auden: For the Time Being (1944 / 2013)•
Richard Avedon: W. H. Auden (1960)W. H. Auden: Critical Editions (2001-2013)
[Amazon.com.au - 28/7-12/8/2022]:
The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest". 1944. Ed. Arthur C. Kirsch. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. 2003. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. 1947. Ed. Alan Jacobs. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011.
For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. 1944. Ed. Alan Jacobs. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) - or 'hug a shady wet nun', to quote his own favourite acronym - has already been the subject of quite a few posts by me on various platforms. There's a general overview here, a comprehensive bibliography here, a breakdown of the newly completed ten-volume edition of his collected works here, and even a discussion of a group of writers somewhat artificially designated as being 'in Auden's shadow' here. Anyone would think I was obsessed with the man!
The recent appearance of Professor Edward Mendelson's two-volume edition of Auden's Complete Poems has prompted me to look back on another project overseen by Mendelson, the series of Critical Editions of particular works of Auden's which appeared from Princeton University Press between 2001 and 2013.
It's hard to tell if this series is ongoing or not. I can certainly foresee a need for annotated editions of such longer works as The Orators (1932) or New Year Letter (1941) at some point in the future, but whether or not this actually happens probably depends on the response to the five volumes which have already been issued. They are, in order of appearance:
- Lectures on Shakespeare. Reconstructed and edited by Arthur C. Kirsch, with a new preface by the editor. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. 2001. Princeton Classics. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019.
- Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928. Ed. Katherine Bucknell. 1994. Expanded Paperback Edition. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003.
- The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest". 1944. Ed. Arthur C. Kirsch. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. 2003. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.
- The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. 1947. Ed. Alan Jacobs. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011.
- For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. 1944. Ed. Alan Jacobs. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.
The fact that the first volume in the list has recently been reprinted under the 'Princeton Classics' banner might well imply an end to the series as a whole, but then who knows? Speculating about the intentions of publishers is as chancy a business as any other enquiry into the unaccountable ways of eschatological entities.
The second volume, the Juvenilia, is also an interesting case. In its original form (as you can see from the image above), it was clearly designated as an outlier of British publisher Faber & Faber's Complete Works of W. H. Auden. There is no mention of a 'Critical Edition' series on either the cover or the title-page.
However, Faber seem to have given up on the idea of collaborating in the 'Complete Works' series sometime in the late 1990s. Thank God their American partners, Princeton University Press, were there to seize the baton! Otherwise us critical edition junkies would have been forced back on our own resources to document the minutiae of Auden's texts, with all their successive layers of revision ...
Does anyone care? Well I do, I'm afraid. It matters to me that in his 1966 Collected Shorter Poems Auden substituted the expression "it has lost / The certainty that constitutes a thing" for the original "it has lost / The qualities that say ‘I am a Thing.’" in his 1938 sonnet "Brussels in Winter." I can make my own conjectures about the reasons behind such revisions to his earlier work, but I do need more information about the chapter and verse of each change: when it took place and in which publication.
Before the appearance of the Complete Poems earlier this year, this short list of 'Critical Editions' was one of the few accurate sources for such information. Are they still necessary now that we have the larger work? I would say so, yes. Much though I admire his decades of steady work on the canon, I still sometimes hanker for an alternative to Edward Mendelson's authorised version of Auden's oeuvre. Alan Jacobs' and Arthur Kirsch's introductions and notes to these three editions of Auden's long poems of the 1940s, albeit compiled under his general editorship, give me at least some hint of that.
Another approach to the documentation of his evolving canon can be found in the 'Auden Studies' series compiled under the general editorshop of Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins for Oxford University Press in the early 1990s.
It took me quite a while to get hold of all three volumes of this, but I'm happy to say that I've now succeeded.
- W. H. Auden: ‘The Map of all My Youth’. Early Works, Friends & Influences. Auden Studies 1. Ed. Katherine Bucknell & Nicholas Jenkins. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
- W. H. Auden: ‘The Language of Learning and the Language of Love’. Uncollected Writings, New Interpretations. Auden Studies 2. Ed. Katherine Bucknell & Nicholas Jenkins. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
- W. H. Auden: ‘In Solitude, For Company’. W. H. Auden after 1940: Unpublished Prose and Recent Criticism. Auden Studies 3. Ed. Katherine Bucknell & Nicholas Jenkins. London: Clarendon Press, 1995.
B. C. Bloomfield & Edward Mendelson. W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924–1969. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972.Mind you, that reallly just scratches the surface of Audeniana in general. For a start, there's the comprehensive bibliography pictured above. Then there's a steadily growing web of commentary, critical and biographical, on all aspects of the poet and his work:
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Biographies (in chronological order):
- Osborne, Charles. W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet. 1979. London: Papermac, 1982.
- Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. 1981. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1983.
- Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. 1981. London: Faber, 1999.
- Davenport-Hines, Richard. Auden. 1995. Vintage. London: Random House, 2003.
- Mendelson, Edward. Later Auden. 1999. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
- Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography. 1981, 1999. With a new preface by the author. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Charles Osborne's biography was rushed out in a hurry, a few years after the poet's death. It's really Humphrey Carpenter's 1981 book which still has to be seen as the standard life.
Which leaves us with the interesting case of Edward Mendelson's two-part 'critical biography' - if that's what it is. I must confess that it hadn't really occurred to me that it was a biography until he reissued a revised version of it it under that title. It seemed more like a chronologically arranged meditation on the poet's work as a whole than a conventional life and works.
However you define it, though, it's a deeply insightful work: especially part one, Early Auden (1981), which quite revolutionised my understanding of his work when I first read it sometime in the early 1990s.
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Personal Memoirs:
- Spender, Stephen, ed. W. H. Auden: A Tribute. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1975.
- Farnan, Dorothy J. Auden in Love. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
- Rowse, A. L. The Poet Auden: A Personal Memoir. London: Methuen, 1987.
- Ansen, Alan. The Table Talk of W. H. Auden. Ed. Nicholas Jenkins. 1990. London: Faber, 1991.
- Clark, Thekla. Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Introduction by James Fenton. London: Faber, 1995.
I've already mentioned in an earlier post how much I'm indebted to Stephen Spender's pioneering anthology of reminiscences about Auden. There's much of interest to be gleaned from these other memoirs, too. If his Table Talk is a little disappointing, the same could certainly not be said of (especially) Dorothy Farnan and Thekla Clark's very different accounts.
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Literary Criticism:
- Everett, Barbara. Auden. 1964. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969.
- Spears, Monroe K., ed. Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964.
- Fuller, John. A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden. London: Thames & Hudson, 1970.
- Fuller, John. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. 1998. London: Faber, 2007.
- Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. 1976. London: Faber, 1979.
- Haffenden, John, ed. W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage. The Critical Heritage Series. Ed. B. C. Southam. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
- Smith, Stan. W. H. Auden. Rereading Literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.
- Bryant, Marsha. Auden and Documentary in the 1930s. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
- Fuller, John. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. 1998. London: Faber, 2007.
- Smith, Stan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Wasley, Aidan. The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011.
This is, of course, a mere selection from the ocean of commentaries, selected editions, and other aids to reflection on the art of Auden. Stan Smith is, in my view, one of the most illuminating commentators on him, but of course John Fuller's work is also indispensable. As for the others, some concentrate more on the social history of the 1930s and the post-war era than on Auden's particular contribution to it, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Donald Mitchell. Britten and Auden in the 1930s: The Year 1936. T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, 1979. Aldeburgh Studies in Music, 5. Foreword by Alan Hollinghurst. Washington DC: Boydell Press, 1981.
There are also a number of less easily definable works. Benjamin Britten's collaborations with Auden have already attracted a good deal of commentary from his own biographers.
Nor can one easily ignore such oddities as James Merrill's strange poetic compilation of ouija board messages from Auden and Chester Kalman (among sundry others). Is it great poetry? Not in my opinion, no, but it's certainly far more readable than most booklength poems, old or new (including some of Auden's own, I fear).
James Merrill. The Changing Light at Sandover: Including the whole of The Book of Ephraim, Mirabell’s Books of Number, Scripts for the Pageant and a new coda, The Higher Keys. 1992. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Other recent books about the poet include one from Scottish detective novelist Alexander McCall Smith, and another from English detective novelist Ian Sansom:
Alexander McCall Smith. What W. H. Auden Can Do for You. Writers on Writers. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Ian Sansom. September 1, 1939: W. H. Auden and the Afterlife of a Poem. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2020.
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