Auden's Reading List: Fate and the Individual in European Literature

I love finding out what Auden thought it was important for young scholars to know. This as "Required reading"--in a 2 credit class, one semester--he taught at the University of Michigan during WWII. A pretty hefty reading list, even if you omit Goethe and Henry Adams--Moby Dick and The Brothers Karamazov in one semester's pretty heft already. Also to do Wagner during the War...

Dante, Divine Comedy
Aeschylus the Agamemnon (Louis McNeice trans.)
or
Sophocles, The Antigone (Pitts or Fitzgerald trans.)
Horace Odes
Shakespeare Othello
Hamlet
The Tempest
Ben Jonson Volpone
Pascal Pensees
Racine Phedre
Blake Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Goethe Faust part I (and a handwritten 'omit')
Kierkegaard Fear and Loathing
Baudelaire Journals
Ibsen Peer Gynt
Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov
Rimbaud Une Saison en Enfer
Henry Adams Education of Henry Adams ('omit')
Melville Moby Dick
Rilke Journal of my Other Self
Kafka The Castle
T.S. Eliot Family Reunion

Opera Libretti
Orpheus (Gluck) Flying Dutchman (Wagner)
Don Giovanni (mozart) Tristan und Isolde (Wagner)
The Magic Flute (Mozart) Gotterdammerung (Wagner)
Fidelio (Beethoven) Carmen (Bizet
Traviata (Verdi)

Recommended Critical Reading [finally some women!]
Patterns of Culture Ruth Benedict
From the South Seas Margaret Meade
Middletown Lynd
The Heroic Age Chadwick
Epic and Romance L.P. Ker
Plato To-Day [lol] R.M.S. Corpsman
Christianity and Classical Culture C.N. Cochrane
The Allegory of Love C.S. Lewis