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RR 2005/301 The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden Edited by Stan Smith Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2004 xxii + 262 pp. ISBN 0 521 82962 3 (hbck), ISBN 0 521 53647 2 (pbck) £45, $65 (hbck); £15.99, $23.99 (pbck) Cambridge Companion to Literature
Keywords English literature, Poetry
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120510613193
The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden comes hard on the heels of the W.H. Auden Encyclopedia (Izzo, 2004) reviewed somewhat critically by Ken Irwin in these columns (RR 2004/436). The present volume, edited by Stan Smith, contains contributions on diverse areas of Auden's achievement by 18 different hands from both sides of the Atlantic. Most are academics: one, Peter Porter, is a well-known highly acclaimed poet; another, Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden's distinguished biographer. Edward Mendelson, with the late Barry C. Bloomfield, compiled the definitive bibliography of Auden and is the executor of the Auden estate.
Abbreviations and Textual Note (pp. xi-xiii), and a Chronology of Auden's Life and Works (pp. xiv-xxi), are followed by editor Stan Smith's informative Introduction (pp. 1-14). Smith surveys Auden's output and reception from his earliest writing to his later output and posthumous reputation. Smith perceptively writes that "not only did [Auden] record the forces and obsessions that dominated that unlamented century [the twentieth], thereby setting the agenda for the present one; he also attempted to synthesise the intellectual and interpretative systems that make sense of it" (p. 14).
Richard Davenport-Hines,...