Later Auden

About this book

The definitive study of Audens 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 Audens 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 Mendelsons acclaimed Early Auden. Later Auden links the changes in Audens 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 Audens 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.