Frank Kermode writes:

This latest instalment of Edward Mendelson’s edition of the Complete Works contains Auden’s prose writings from a mere six years, roughly the poet’s forties. It was preceded by two large volumes covering 1926 to 1938 and 1939 to 1948. The three total more than two thousand pages and there will have to be at least one more volume, covering the period between 1955 and Auden’s death in 1973. When you add in the volumes already devoted to plays, libretti, poems, it becomes hard to avoid describing the whole enterprise as heroic. In fact it could also be described as unique, for no other 20th-century English poet has been so fully and patiently honoured. We are now hearing of a project to do something on these lines for T.S. Eliot, but that will be the work of many years and has hardly begun. This huge project is well advanced. Auden appointed Mendelson his literary executor in 1972 and time has shown this to have been an inspired choice. The work of collection and editing – Auden didn’t keep copies of his shorter pieces – required many laborious and skilful feats of scholarship, supported by Mendelson’s biographical studies, Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999), and by an indispensable bibliography.

(LRB 7 February 2008)

Princeton | hardback 779 pp. |ISBN: 9780691133263