What living in the United States did allow Auden was the possibility to make a precarious living, not (God forbid) from writing poems, but from reviewing, editing, and guest lecturing in colleges and universities. He did so from his home in New York City, in order to spend each summer writing, firstly on the Italian island of Ischia and then, from 1957, outside Vienna. However, in 1956 Auden became Professor of Poetry at Oxford. This five-year appointment saw an increase in the time he was to put into essays and lectures, and though he continued to publish poetry at the rate of approximately one volume every five years, I find a lessening of intensity in Homage to Clio (1960) and About the House (1965). Now we have the evidence to show just how much energy went into the prose over this period. Indeed, the present volume, under the exemplary editorship of his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, covers seven years and is one thousand pages in length. It includes The Dyer’s Hand (1962), that brilliant miscellany of essays and of the Oxford lectures, but it also republishes for the first time a range of other material, including reviews, prefaces, and essays, much of which is of immense value and, I would hazard to say, destined to be among the lasting literary non-fiction of its age.

One reason for this is because Auden, more lucidly than most, was able to identify and describe our age of anxiety. Almost every aspect of modern life tends to alienate us from any communality, and shut us up within our subjective selves. From such a vantage point it becomes difficult to believe in the reality of other people. Fragmentation, a lack of encounters with the sacred, and a monotone impressionism characterise much of our artistic production. In verse of the last sixty years, the result has been a hyper-subjectivism in its two polarised forms of hermeticism and confessionalism. In the face of such a situation, Auden argued, ‘Art can only have one subject – man as a conscious unique person.’ The characteristic hero of our age is not the great man, or the romantic rebel, but the humble individual on a ‘quest for authenticity’:

Everybody who lives in a technological civilization (and in the West we have lived in one for a century and a half), is in constant danger of ceasing to be himself – ceasing to be even a member of a certain nation, class, or profession and becoming an anonymous unit of the public.

And yet, Auden is also a self-effacing writer, and rarely autobiographical. When he writes, ‘The only proper resistance is the cultivation of a dispassionate passion to see things as they are and to remember what really happened’, we understand that his self must raise itself out of the extremes of subjectivism, if necessary by its bootstraps, and be in relation to others. The result was Auden’s great civic poetry. In talking of his art in these pieces, he returns to the metaphor of a community opposed to that inchoate crowd the public:

The subject matter of a poem is comprised of a crowd of recollected occasions of feeling, among which the most important are recollections of encounters with sacred beings or events. This crowd the poet attempts to transform into a community by embodying it in a verbal society.

Because poetry is made from the medium of language, and words are a product of human society, they embody the ideal not only of communication but of community. If, as Auden wrote, a poet ‘is, before everything else, a person who is passionately in love with language’, then he is also necessarily a believer in the possibility of human love more widely. In a well-known phrase from The Dyer’s Hand, Auden expressed this as follows:

Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct – it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.

The cumulative power of such thoughts is an eloquent defence of something we have almost forgotten: the moral importance of poetry.

The themes of his prose stay close to those of his poetry. There is the same passionate celebration of a wide variety of life, the same openness and lightness, and the same endearing humility here:

The only sensible procedure for a critic is to keep silent about works which he believes to be bad, while at the same time vigorously campaigning for those which he believes to be good, especially if they are being neglected or underestimated by the public … Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character … One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

He wisely steers clear of contemporary poetry, believing that ‘practicing artists are the worst possible judges of any contemporary work except their own’. And with characteristic drollery the introductory remarks to another review include:

When I read a review of a poet whose work I don’t know, I never read what the reviewer says; I only look at his quotations. This is very unsatisfactory. In the first place, there are seldom enough of them and, in the second, it is almost impossible for the reviewer to be just in his selection. If he likes the work he chooses the best passages; if he dislikes it, the worst. If this were a sensible world, I should now give extensive quotations from Mr Philip Larkin and Mr Geoffrey Hill without any comment whatsoever, but this is not a sensible world.

Auden was a lover of the aphorism, and in many ways the maxim characterises his prose style. The aphorism is so difficult to master because, unlike most criticism which focuses on details, and most theories, which tend to abstraction, it must be concrete while convincing every reader that it is ‘either universally true or true of every member of the class to which it refers, irrespective of the reader’s convictions’. A few delightful examples from The Dyer’s Hand: ‘The poet is the father of his poem; its mother is a language: one could list poems as race horses are listed – out of L by P’; and, ‘The greatest writer cannot see through a brick wall but, unlike the rest of us, he does not build one.’ They are usually short, but not always:

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behaviour; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?

At the same time, the aphorism is ‘essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser or more intelligent than his readers.’ This may be so, in which case Auden’s achievement is all the more remarkable, for throughout this book I was struck by his ability to invoke the first-person plural pronoun with conviction. Like the best teachers, Auden permits us to think we are sharing a discovery, rather than being lectured at.

Another characteristic of Auden’s prose is his love of lists. At first this may seem unpoetic, but in life we are continually categorising and ordering our experiences. The important thing is not to let such categories solidify as dogma, but to treat them as temporary stays against disorder, or, as Auden might have called them, improvised communities. Like the aphorism, however, they must also be true generally. Take the opening phrase of this review chosen almost at random: ‘The three qualities one looks for in any anthology are Good Taste, Original Taste, and Variety of Taste …’

One of his most brilliant categorisations was that of poets into Ariels or Prosperos. ‘Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical.’ In all good poems both aspects are present, but either Ariel’s delight in the magical game of language, or Prospero’s desire to instruct and set things in order, tends to have the upper hand. What this volume reveals is that Auden himself sought and found a balance between the two, not only in his poetry but also in his prose, something I hope this admirable project by Princeton University Press may bring to a wider audience.