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

Mendelson’s editorial philosophy is appealingly unobtrusive, despite the enormity of his task:Ī year before Auden’s death, when we were discussing my executorship, I asked if I should publish his libretto Paul Bunyan. 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. 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.

2: 1940-1973 Edited by Edward Mendelson Princeton University Press, 2022

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

Collected Poems by W.H. Auden