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Amazon.co.uk Review
Edward Mendelson's Later Auden finishes the account of the poet that he offered us in Early Auden and takes us from 1939--when Auden arrived in America at the fag-end of the 1930s ("as the clever hopes expire / of a low, dishonest decade")--until his death in 1973 when incorrigible smoking and drinking had ravaged him; as he himself famously remarked "my face looks like a wedding-cake left in the rain".
Mendelson's book is not a biography in the strict sense. Rather it takes its cue from Auden's comment that "for a poet myself, autobiography is redundant, since anything of any importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, into a poem". Mendelson offers an account of the writing: he demonstrates how and where Auden's life, intellectual development and transient enthusiasms can be observed playing themselves out in the poetry. Mendelson acknowledges his debt to the scholarly apparatus that has been developed over the years by Auden scholars--notably by figures like Nicholas Jenkins, Katherine Bucknell and John Fuller--and his own role as Auden's literary executor ensures that the readings are close and justifiable.
The book begins with a considerable and considered account of the famous elegy "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", with its resonant line that "poetry makes nothing happen". Yeats had died only three days after Auden's arrival in the United States, and Mendelson fascinatingly traces the evolution of Auden's elegy and the way it affected Auden's own edgy poetic aspirations. As the volume continues the ups and downs of Auden's relationships--most notably with Chester Kallman, but also with his own gift--are explored through the poems and vice versa. Auden was intellectually and poetically restless; he employed any verse form he could lay his hands on, invented others and experimented substantially; he had strong but shifting political convictions and also converted to an unpious and undogmatic Christianity. His work ranges from the obscure and philosophically prosaic to the resounding lyrics that have become deservedly famous (not least "Stop all the Clocks", immortalised by actor John Hannah in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral). Many of our younger contemporary poets owe some debt to Auden; Mendelson's patient, informed history of the writing and--by extension--of the man is a welcome and accessible addition to exisiting scholarship and should please admirers of arguably the most influential English poet of the century. --Robert Potts
Review
The richly detailed follow-up to Early Auden (not reviewed), Mendelson's well-received study of the poet's most notable period. With unparalleled access as executor of Auden's literary estate, Mendelson (English and Comparative Literature/Columbia) blazes a scholarly trail ending in Auden's "private spheres" as an expatriate poet and lecturer after the "public chaos" of WWII, which was preceded by his formative, more eventful experiences of the 1930s. Here he takes Auden at his word when he wrote "anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, into a poem", and nothing, however obscure, escapes Mendelson. While the poetry that made Auden famous was created in Britain, this later period includes major, rich works such as The Age of Anxiety, the tour de force The Sea and the Mirror, and the anthology favorites The Shield of Achilles and "In Praise of Limestone" - all of which Mendelson exhaustively unpacks, making good use of drafts, correspondence, and Auden's own literary criticism. With these and much of Auden's prolific output, he elucidates both their relation to the poet's personal life, which was dominated by his rise-and-fall affair with Chester Kallman, and his personal mythology, with its high-church Christianity and Jungian inclinations. While Mendelson ably keeps up with Auden's restless intellectual existence, which absorbed Kierkegaard and Tillich, among others, he underplays his early legacy, especially the influences of Freud and Marx, whom Auden could not fully expel from his creative pantheon. Just as Mendelson assisted Humphrey Carpenter with researching his masterly biography of Auden in 1981, here he provides an invaluable academic trove. Not a critical study so much as a biography of Auden's poetry itself that is comprehensive in situating the work in the life. (Kirkus Reviews)
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