This volume contains all of W. H. Auden's prose works from 1949 through
1955, including many little-known essays that exemplify his range, wit,
depth, and wisdom. The book includes the complete text of Auden's first
separately published prose book, The Enchafèd Flood, or, The Romantic
Iconography of the Sea, followed by more than one hundred separate
essays, reviews, introductions, and lectures, as well as a questionnaire
(complete with his own answers) about the reader's fantasy version of
Eden. Two reviews that Auden wrote for the New Yorker, but which the
magazine never printed, appear here for the first time, and a series of
aphorisms previously published only in a French translation are printed
in English. Among the previously unpublished lectures is a long account
of the composition of his poem "Prime," complete with his comments on
early rejected drafts.
The variety of style and subject in this book is almost inexhaustible.
Auden writes about the imaginary mirrors that everyone carries through
life; French existentialism and New Yorker cartoons; Freud,
Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Camus; Keats, Cervantes, Melville,
Colette, Byron, Virgil, Yeats, Tolkien, and Virginia Woolf; opera,
ballet, cinema, prosody, and music; English and American poetry and
society; and politics and religion.
The introduction by Edward Mendelson places the essays in biographical
and historical context, and the extensive textual notes explain obscure
contemporary references and provide an often-amusing history of Auden's
work as an editor of anthologies and a series of books by younger poets.
