The Complete Works of W. H. Auden - Poems Vol. 1: 1927-1939 Edited by Edward Mendelson Princeton University Press, 2022

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden - Poems Vol. 2: 1940-1973 Edited by Edward Mendelson Princeton University Press, 2022

The magnificent Complete Works of W. H. Auden that’s been appearing under the aegis of Princeton University Press for years now comes to its long-awaited conclusion, after plays, libretti, and six fat volumes of assorted prose, with two volumes of poetry edited by the great Auden biographer and scholar (and Auden’s literary executor) Edward Mendelson. Mendelson’s Auden has long been regarded as a monument of literary scholarship, and these two heavy poetry volumes complete the grounds for that acclaim. 

Mendelson’s editorial philosophy is appealingly unobtrusive, despite the enormity of his task:

A year before Auden’s death, when we were discussing my executorship, I asked if I should publish his libretto Paul Bunyan. He answered, after a brief pause, “You must use your judgement.” I think this meant something more stringent than, for example, “You must follow your opinions”, or, “You must do whatever you like”. I have tried to suppress my wishes and opinions when judging what to include in this edition or how to present it in the text, but in preparing the notes, I have not tried to ignore those wishes entirely. 

The product of all this judgement and discretion is an amazing thicket of scholarship and commentary draped around some of the most-studied and most-quoted poetry of the 20th century, with all alternate forms or line-readings dutifully chased down and pinned to the cork board as securely as the best scholarship in the world can manage it. Auden’s friends and colleagues and publishers and critics talked and argued endlessly about his work (it was obvious from very early on that this was a genuinely major poet in their midst), and in these pages, every poem is chased by the echoes of all that chatter. 

Take, for instance, the famous poem “September 1, 1939,” one stanza of which famously goes like this:

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Readers turning back to page 779 of Volume I will learn (after reading about how Auden initially submitted it to The New Yorker on terms that it not be edited or that possible edits even be mentioned to him; off it went to The New Republic) the backstage story of that resonant final line:

When Oscar Williams asked to restore the omitted stanza when reprinting the poem in his anthology The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse (1955), Auden agreed but specified that its last line should read “We must love one another and die”. This variant was freely attributed to Cyril Connolly by Auden (in conversation) and by Kallman (in conversation and in a note to the typescript of his and Auden’s 1973 libretto The Entertainment of the Senses, which quotes the variant); in 1948, when Auden was visiting London, Connolly wrote this inscription in a copy of The Poetical Works of George Crabb (1914): “Wystan from Cyril/’we must love one another AND die’” 

The fact that those curious readers need to stick a thumb in at page 377 and go hunting around on page 779 points to a persistent and bewildering annoyance of all these Princeton volumes. For decades, the prevailing cringing reasoning in publishing is that footnotes repel the curious general reader, and so footnotes must be transformed into end notes and packed away at the back of the volume, despite how tiresomely inconvenient they are there, divorced from the occasion for their existence by hundreds of pages. But each of these Auden poetry volumes weighs five pounds and costs $60 – they’ll never appear in most retail bookstores and aren’t intended for the general reader, who’ll likely stick to Mendelson’s own splendid “Collected Poems” volume in the Modern Library. So the lack of footnotes right where the eye instinctively looks for them feels a bit more irksome than usual, particularly considering how active the dialogue is between text and elaboration. 

But then, the comparatively rarefied target audience for this entire series is probably well-accustomed to keeping two sets of bookmarks (and likewise accustomed to the sheer inhospitable size and heft of these volumes, which make them an endeavor to use for any length of time), and the rewards here are so many and so manifest as to heavily overcome such little irritations. After so many superb volumes, readers now have the definitive scholarly edition of Auden’s main claim to immortality.

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.