From Publishers Weekly
This mammoth, accessible study ties the life of major English poet W.H. Auden to his ideas, and both to his poetry. MendelsonAa Columbia University professor who is also Auden's literary executorApicks up where his Early Auden left off, in 1939, when Auden emigrated to the United States. He sees in Auden two kinds of poetry, which he calls "myth" and "parable." The first stresses the impersonal and the aesthetic; the second, the voluntary and the ethical. Auden's best poems represent or acknowlege both; his weaker work adheres to one or the other. This intriguing interpretive scheme gets necessarily submerged as Mendelson tracks Auden's voluminous output, his life and his rapidly-shifting ideas. Throughout his writing life Auden's deepest beliefs changed frequently, sometimes faster than he could finish the poems he meant to embody them. (Some beliefs were strange indeed: in 1940 Auden thought that he had been granted true loveAin the form of longtime companion Chester KallmanAas a reward for his childhood attachment to lead-mining machinery.) Most usefully, Mendelson has read what Auden read, finding in now-neglected thinkers (Charles Williams, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, R.G. Collingwood, F.J.E. Raby and Owen Barfield) the seeds of this omnivorous and idiosyncratic poet's changes. Auden's successive reversals and self-repudiations can be dizzying; Mendelson's clear prose and copious citations do their best to help readers hang on. His focus on Auden's long poems and his defense of Auden's very late "domestic" poems will send many readers back to them. And the poet's own amply quoted manuscripts will give most readers one more source of pleasure: "You're so good," he tells one intimate, "and I'm a neurotic middle-aged butterball." (Apr.) FYI: John Fuller's W.H. Auden: A Commentary, published last year, is an exhaustive reader's companion to Auden's work. (Princeton Univ. $35 640p ISBN 0-691-00419-6)Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
When British poet Fuller published his Reader's Guide to W.H. Auden (LJ 5/15/70), it was widely praised for its scholarship, organization, and completeness. Fuller, a professor of English at Oxford, knew then that further Auden discoveries were yet to be made; hence this masterfly latest work. Like the earlier book, this is an essential source for understanding so much that is Auden: Anglo-Saxon and Old English influences, allusions, form, and interpretation. An invaluable update, it includes not only Auden's collected and some uncollected poetry beginning in the late 1920s but also his plays, libretti, and (of substantial interest to Auden aficionados) some unused draft material. Fuller's commentary is erudite but also practical in revealing Auden as a complex, demanding poet and human being. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., INCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
Auden's criticism is exceptional in its depth and breadth. He thoughtfully comments on almost all the plays as well as the sonnets. . . . Readers will admire Kirsch's Auden. It is quite possible that they will like him, too.


Book Description
This is an indispensable reference guide to the works of one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden's writing is notoriously complex--full of puzzling allusions and shaped by influences as diverse as Old English poetry and Auden's own theory of psychosomatic illness. To help readers understand Auden's work, the poet and scholar John Fuller examines all of Auden's published poems, plays, and libretti, leaving out only some juvenilia. In unprecedented detail, he reviews the works' publishing history, paraphrases difficult passages, and explains allusions. He points out interesting variants (including material abandoned in drafts), identifies sources, looks at verse forms, and offers critical interpretations. Along the way, he presents a wealth of facts about Auden's works and life that are available in no other publication. The book is a major revision of Fuller's critically acclaimed Reader's Guide to Auden, published in 1970. It contains more than twice the material of that earlier volume. Fuller organizes the book on the basis of the individual collections that Auden himself originally published, with sections of "uncollected" work interwoven. Clear, meticulously researched, and carefully designed for ease of use, it is an essential guide for anyone interested in Auden's remarkable and sometimes elusive writing.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This is an indispensable reference guide to the works of one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden's writing is notoriously complex--full of puzzling allusions and shaped by influences as diverse as Old English poetry and Auden's own theory of psychosomatic illness. To help readers understand Auden's work, the poet and scholar John Fuller examines all of Auden's published poems, plays, and libretti, leaving out only some juvenilia. In unprecedented detail, he reviews the works' publishing history, paraphrases difficult passages, and explains allusions. He points out interesting variants (including material abandoned in drafts), identifies sources, looks at verse forms, and offers critical interpretations. Along the way, he presents a wealth of facts about Auden's works and life that are available in no other publication.

The book is a major revision of Fuller's critically acclaimed Reader's Guide to Auden, published in 1970. It contains more than twice the material of that earlier volume. Fuller organizes the book on the basis of the individual collections that Auden himself originally published, with sections of "uncollected" work interwoven. Clear, meticulously researched, and carefully designed for ease of use, it is an essential guide for anyone interested in Auden's remarkable and sometimes elusive writing.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING