Still, whatever Mendelson thought then, he has now given us everything, or almost everything. (A final volume, Personal Writings: Selected Letters, Journals, and Poems Written for Friends, is forthcoming.) It’s been an astonishing act of literary scholarship and personal dedication on Mendelson’s part, and readers the world over should be thankful for it. He is always described, and self-described, as homosexual, though for several years in the 1940s he had a sexual relationship with a woman, Rhoda Jaffe, and brief affairs with women at other times in his life. ↩

There is power in this work, though personally I find it too naked, too direct. The revelations are intimate, but of the speaker’s personality, and too often the poems don’t discover revelations for themselves, in their syntax or form, as before, but instead simply recount a clarity achieved in psychoanalysis:Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in 1907, the youngest of three boys. (His brothers became a farmer and a geologist.) When he was a year old, his father, George Auden, became the school medical officer for Birmingham, and the family moved there. Dr. Auden served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Gallipoli, Egypt, and France during World War I. Auden boarded at St. Edmund’s prep school in Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, who became his lifelong friend, his collaborator, and in the late 1920s and 1930s, his lover. Between 1920 and 1925 Auden boarded at Gresham’s School in Holt, Norfolk, and at the suggestion of a fellow pupil, Robert Medley, with whom he was in love, began to write poetry. He had been rejected by the US Army in August 1942 on medical grounds, because of his homosexuality. ↩ In his first year in New York, Auden, then thirty-two, met the eighteen-year-old Chester Kallman, who was, as The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden rather brutally puts it, “an aggressively ‘out’ and promiscuous homosexual who, though Jewish, had the stereotypical ‘Aryan’ good looks Auden favoured.” Through turmoil and betrayals and temporary separations, Kallman and Auden were to remain partners for the rest of Auden’s life.

The poem is structured around Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and takes in references as varied as to a school friend killed in the Troubles; Willie John McBride, the Irish captain of the 1974 British Lions rugby team; and Body Shop lip balm. Astonishingly fluent, Auden could write poems of immense power that take their subject matter head-on. When it came to love poems, more circumspection was needed, but using the second-person pronoun licensed a direct approach of sorts: “Lay your sleeping head, my love.” Though he later became famous for lines that have the feel of diagnostic epigrams (“We must love one another or die”) or generalizing maxims (“About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters”), the early poems are necessarily oblique, and this vital hedging and coding gives rise to a new style. “Audenesque” came to mean minatory, knowing, allusive, densely enigmatic. Behind that approach lies also a very English irony, a refusal to stand entirely foursquare behind the thing being said, a tone that allows some play within it. And play, for Auden, created a space where he could exist in his complexities. He thought that “to grow up does not mean to outgrow either childhood or adolescence but to make use of them in an adult way. But for the child in us, we should be incapable of intellectual curiosity.” The “intricate play of the mind” allowed Auden to entertain, as it were, notions, and he was intellectually promiscuous, always open to new modes, new thoughts. Eliot’s well-known observation of Henry James, that he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it, might be reversed in Auden’s situation. He was interested in everything—in psychology, Christianity, opera, Thucydides, Diaghilev, Tolstoy, Shakespeare; or, to take some examples from his poem “Spain 1937,”“the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing,”“the diffusion/Of the counting-frame and the cromlech,”“the photographing of ravens,”“the divination of water,”“the origin of Mankind,”“the absolute value of Greek,”“the installation of dynamos and turbines,”“theological feuds in the taverns”… Take the fifteenth poem (they are numbered rather than titled) of the thirty in his first collection: Shortlisted alongside Sy-Quia were Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd, The English Summer by Holly Hopkins, Some Integrity by Padraig Regan, and Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire.

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While at school Laird won national poetry competitions but was set to study law at Cambridge before changing to English. "As is fairly usual for any small town, if you were regarded as having half a brain it was assumed you should become a doctor or a lawyer. So while changing was obviously the right decision for me, it was a big thing to give up a vocational course for something more abstract." The man who, during the thirties, was one of the five or six best poets in the world has gradually turned into a rhetoric mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo, into an automaton that keeps making little jokes, little plays on words, little rhetorical engines, as compulsively and unendingly and uneasily as a neurotic washes his hands. The Murderess” contrasts lust (“I tell you men/were leering to themselves”) with the historical violence done to the female (“the sun/opens to consume the Virgin on the fifteenth day”). Any deities present are also complicit. After the virgin has been sacrificed (“It was like slitting fish”), the reader learns that “God presided at her body.” The Age of Anxiety is virtuosic in places, full of verbal energy and rhythm and documentary details (“Near-sighted scholars on canal paths/Defined their terms”) but is overextended, and all four characters sound both a lot like Auden and, thanks to the insistent Anglo-Saxon alliteration, like no one who’s ever lived. (“Muster no monsters, I’ll meeken my own…./You may wish till you waste, I’ll want here…./Too blank the blink of these blind heavens.”) The unnaturalness of the language begins to grate. Publisher Ithys Press is unrepentant, saying, “The book was conceived not as a commercial venture but as a carefully crafted tribute to a rather different Joyce, the family man and grandfather.”