Later Auden

Auden #2

by Edward Mendelson

The definitive study of Auden's poems from 1939 to 1973.

"For a poet like myself, an autobiography is redundant," W. H. Auden wrote to a friend, "since anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, in a poem." This book is the history of Auden's poems, and of the events that went into them, from the time he moved to the United States until his death, completing the story begun in Edward Mendelson's acclaimed Early Auden .

Later Auden links the changes in Auden's intellectual, emotional, religious, and erotic life with his shifting public roles--as representative of political causes, as researcher working with the U.S. Army in postwar Germany, as public moralist, as lecturer and teacher, and above all as poet. Mendelson deftly reveals how Auden converted the success and later wreckage of his relationship with Chester Kallman into the seemingly impersonal meditations of some of his long poems, and explores the ways his later poetry celebrates the human body and represents it in verse. Throughout, he reveals the depth of Auden's struggles with himself and with the temptations of his growing fame, showing how these struggles gave shape to his imperishable art.

This inner biography of a great poet and thinker has unusual breadth and intensity. An absorbing narrative of a varied, productive life, it will interest everyone who cares about literature.

Genres: Poetry, Biography, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

608 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

About the author

Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W.H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006), about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
He has edited standard editions of works by W. H. Auden, including Collected Poems (1976; 2nd edn. 1990; 3rd edn., 2007), The English Auden (1977), Selected Poems (1979, 2nd edn., 2007), As I Walked Out One Evening (selected light verse, 1995), and the continuing Complete Works of W. H. Auden (1986– ).
His work on Thomas Pynchon includes Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978) and numerous essays, including "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49" (1975; reprinted in the 1978 collection) and "Gravity's Encyclopedia" (in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon). The latter essay introduced the critical category of "encyclopedic narrative," further elaborated in a later essay, "Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon".
He is the editor of annotated editions of novels by Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, and Anthony Trollope. With Michael Seidel he co-edited Homer to Brecht; The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions (1977).
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was the first Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Before teaching at Columbia, he was an associate professor of English at Yale University and a visiting associate professor of English at Harvard University. He received a B.A. from the University of Rochester (1966) and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University (1969).
Since 1986 he has written about computing, software, and typography and is a contributing editor of PC Magazine.
He is married to the writer Cheryl Mendelson.

Reviews

[E. Merrill Brouder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compared to other biographies, or even other biographies of Auden (such as Davenport-Hines'), Mendelson's two volume work is less of a narrative and more of a Matisse-esque collage. Using hundreds of lines snipped from Auden's poetry and prose, Mendelson offers intrepid readers with critical images of the poet in each moment of human importance.

The reader is guided though the development of Auden's philosophy, his growth as a person, and his religious and artistic influences, until the text unwind into Auden's death when we glimpse his "secret life."

[Candy Wood]

Fully aware that his subject was not a fan of literary biography, Edward Mendelson has provided a readable and often moving account of W.H. Auden's life and work from the poet's arrival in New York in 1939 until his death in 1973. As Auden's literary executor, Mendelson had access to drafts, journals, letters, and lecture transcripts as well as the various published editions of the poems, so he is able to trace the changes in Auden's thought and poetic practice. Sometimes overstating the case for the influence of Auden's reading on his poetry, finding verbal echoes that could be coincidental, he does quote liberally from both poems and prose. Since I read about Auden's fondness for the Oxford English Dictionary at a time when I was discovering that indispensable reference, I was glad to see examples of OED-derived vocabulary here. After reading and seeing Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art, I needed reminding why I admired Auden, and Mendelson's book is an effective reminder.

[Rebecca Helm-Ropelato · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are interested in Auden, his life and his works, this is the book to read. Extraordinary is an understatement.