The poem begins in a theater after a performance of The Tempest has ended. It includes a moving speech in verse by Prospero bidding farewell to Ariel, a section in which the supporting characters speak in a dazzling variety of verse forms about their experiences on the island, and an extravagantly inventive section in prose that sees the uncivilized Caliban address the audience on art--an unalloyed example of what Auden's friend Oliver Sachs has called his "wild, extraordinary and demonic imagination."

Besides annotating Auden's allusions and sources (in notes after the text), Kirsch provides extensive quotations from his manuscript drafts, permitting the reader to follow the poem's genesis in Auden's imagination. This book, which incorporates for the first time previously ignored corrections that Auden made on the galleys of the first edition, also provides an unusual opportunity to see the effect of one literary genius upon another.

A fat man looks like a cross between a very young child and a pregnant mother. The Greeks thought of Narcissus as a slender youth, but I think they were wrong. I see him as a middle-aged man with a corporation, for, however ashamed he may be of displaying it in public, in private a man with a belly loves it dearly--it may be an unprepossessing child to look at, but he's borne it all by himself.

Almost all the works included here were previously published in incomplete and often inaccessible editions--or were never published at all. The book prints for the first time the full text of Paul Bunyan, Auden's first libretto, which he wrote for music by Benjamin Britten. It also includes Auden and Kallman's The Rake's Progress, written for Igor Stravinsky, and Delia, written for Stravinsky but never set to music. The book continues with Auden and Kallman's two libretti written for music by Hans Werner Henze, Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids, and their adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost, composed by Nicolas Nabokov. It also contains their translation of The Magic Flute, with its scenes reordered for greater dramatic coherence and added dialogue for sharper mythical significance, and their antimasque, The Entertainment of the Senses, for music by John Gardner.

The book contains two radio plays--The Dark Valley, a monologue written by Auden alone, and The Rocking Horse Winner, written with James Stern and based on a story by D. H. Lawrence. Also included are the unpublished masque that Auden wrote for Kallman's twenty-second birthday, the unpublished versions of The Dutchess of Malfi that Auden prepared with Bertolt Brecht, scenarios for a film script and a libretto that were never completed, Auden's narrative for the medieval Play of Daniel, two narratives for documentary films, and his song lyrics written for Man of La Mancha before the producer decided to use a different lyricist.

This collection includes over two hundred poems, most of them never published before, concluding with the contents of Auden's privately printed volume, Poems (1928). The poems are generously annotated with information on Auden's education, reading, literary concerns, and personal life. In her introduction, Katherine Bucknell traces important themes relating to the poet's entire career, and describes crucial but hitherto unknown aspects of his youth during his years at Gresham's School and at Christ Church, Oxford. Throughout this work we see in Auden an admirable instinct for experiment, a thorough testing of tradition, and a gathering mastery of technique and thematic argument.

The variety of style and subject in this book is almost inexhaustible. Auden writes about the imaginary mirrors that everyone carries through life; French existentialism and New Yorker cartoons; Freud, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Camus; Keats, Cervantes, Melville, Colette, Byron, Virgil, Yeats, Tolkien, and Virginia Woolf; opera, ballet, cinema, prosody, and music; English and American poetry and society; and politics and religion.

The introduction by Edward Mendelson places the essays in biographical and historical context, and the extensive textual notes explain obscure contemporary references and provide an often-amusing history of Auden's work as an editor of anthologies and a series of books by younger poets.

The editor's notes include explanations of contemporary and private allusions. The long "Last Will and Testament" written in verse by Auden and MacNeice, which Evelyn Waugh described as a "gossip column," is annotated in full. The book will interest not only Auden's many admirers, but everyone concerned with twentieth-century literature and culture.

About the series:

In 1928, Stephen Spender hand-printed thirty copies of a small volume of poems by his friend W. H. Auden--the first published book by a man who was to become the dominant literary figure of his generation and one of the century's greatest poets. Sixty years later, Princeton University Press inaugurated an edition of the complete works of Auden, which is intended to serve as the definitive text for all the works Auden published or intended to publish in the form in which he expected to see them printed: his plays and other drama, libretti, essays and reviews, and poems.

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden will provide a unique opportunity to solve the numerous textual problems connected with the severe revisions Auden made in his own works. The texts are newly edited from Auden's manuscripts by Edward Mendelson, the literary executor of the Auden estate.