Not actually a "letter," though it had to be originally presented as such for him to be allowed to write it while in prison, *De Profundis* is Wilde's masterpiece--one has to have really lived and really, really suffered to have written it and it's amazing that he achieved it.

I only very recently read it--and "got" it. It rings true to me, and is very, very moving and "profound." It ain't summer beach reading.

Wilde is still and will probably always be best known as a "Personality"--that and the author of a couple of decent period plays, a short novel, a few stories, and lots of forgettable poems and such. But THIS--THIS is IT.

He really WAS a great writer, it turns out, after all.

One of the most famous - and infamous - letters in all of literature, De Profundis is a strange little piece of work: either much more than it appears on the surface, or much less. It is something I think everyone should read, if only for its insight into the human character, particularly that of one under great personal suffering. Wilde wrote this extraordinarily long letter from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas, his friend, lover, and the man who - by all accounts - was the reason Wilde was in jail in the first place. Despite repeated assertions in the first few pages alone to the contrary, Wilde seems reluctant to blame himself. He clearly blames Douglas to the hilt, and harbors a certain bitter resentment towards him. And yet... he clearly still hold much dear affection toward - and even loves - Douglas. He still seems to be asking for forgiveness - despite the fact that, by all accounts hardly excluding his own, he was the man wronged. It is quite clear from reading this letter that, desite the view history holds of him, Wilde was clearly a man of very high moral character. Certainly, one would not put Wilde atop a pedastal as the zenith of ethics - he himself says that morals contain "absolutely nothing" for him, and clearly admits - and is proud of - his having lived the high life to the hilt during his youth - but Wilde was a man of principles, and he stuck to those principles to the tragic, bitter end. Perhaps you might say he carried them too far. One gets the sense in reading this letter - or a biography of Wilde - that, not only could he have stopped his immiment imprisonment, but could have severed his ties with Douglas completely - had he wanted to. Apparently, he had his own utterly compelling reasons for not doing so. Whatever the case, Oscar Wilde is one of the most fundamentally and perpetually interesting characters in the whole of history. A self-described man of paradoxes - Wilde was subsequently the true essence of his time, while also being far ahead of his time - De Profundis makes for required reading by one of the most endlessly fascinating individuals you'll ever read about, and also provides a startling - indeed, perhaps too much so - insight into human nature.

De Profundis, though long for a letter, is not a long work in the conventional sense. Consequently, as many editions of Wilde's collected works are available, buying this on its own may be deemed questionable. I highly reccommend purchasing a Collected Works of Oscar if you have not done so already - it's well worth the price - but, should you desire to have more compact editions of specific works, an edition such as this will be privy to your needs.

Ah, me...one doesn't know which to be more irritated
and exasperated with: whether it be Walt Whitman doing
his dissembling shuck-and-shuffle about the children
he had sired (to throw off a probing, serious John
Addington Symonds) -- or Oscar, in this "j'accuse," which
he should have spoken while looking in a mirror, rather
than writing it on paper to Lord Alfred.
This is without doubt a fascinating, horrifying,
and yet in places humorous, "piece de Miserere mei"
(to combine a bit of French with Latin).
If one chooses to believe Oscar, his only fault
was weakness in "giving in" to Lord Alfred. Oh,
come now. Blinded by Eros, reason flies out the
door...if ever reason was in control. There are
some sentences which are devastatingly revealing,
but Oscar doesn't seem to see it. "The trivial in
thought and action is charming. I had made it
the keystone of a very brilliant philosophy expressed
in plays and paradoxes." Ye gods, and little fishes!

And this man dared to call himself a "Classicist?!"
Yikes!!!
The best exercise for the reader is to just take
many of the things which Oscar accuses Lord Alfred
of, and turn them toward the self-blind, self-
justifying Oscar, to see their devastating hitting
of the mark. Never having met the young man, but
only having the "benefit" of hearsay (mostly from
Oscar's literary defenders) Lord Alfred seems to have
been calculating, temperamental (using anger to get
his way), manipulative, etc., etc., etc. The best
description of him may be Wilde's referring to him
with the lines from Aeschylus' play AGAMEMNON,
about the lion cub being raised in a house and
being let loose to wreak havoc and ruin.
But Oscar bears his share of blame -- more than just
that of the "sin" of weakness which he constantly falls
back upon in his own justification. Even in the midst
of what purports to be some sort of penitent cry from
the depths of hell...Oscar still is ever the poseur:
"And I remember that afternoon, as I was in the railway
carriage whirling up to Paris, thinking what an impossible,
terrible, utterly wrong state my life had got into, when
I, a man of world-wide reputation, was actually forced
to run away from England, in order to try and get rid
of a friendship that was entirely destructive of everything
fine in me either from the intellectual or ethical point
of view...." Er, when was the last time that the
"everything fine" had last seen the light of day?
Was Oscar an "Artist," as he consistently claims?
Was he the wronged, harmed Artist? Perhaps only the
reader can decide that for himself. Without doubt
he was witty, acerbic, funny, cute, clever, perhaps
even charming (to some -- sort of like a Pillsbury
Dough Boy with flair and a clever tongue), perhaps
stylish (in a frumpy, velveteen sort of way). Was
he wronged by a predatory clinger and manipulator,
and a hypocritical social prudery and class power
play (Oscar is no Socrates--that's for sure!)? He
hardly seems worthy, in some ways, of being a poster-boy
for Gay Pride parades. More likely, he is a better
warning poster boy for the self-excusing, and never
take-responsibility-for-your-own-actions crowd.
But this is an incredible piece to read and think
about. There is some of it that is mordantly hilarious.

I wish there were more books like this one. Here, the libretto of an almost-forgotten opera is translated by a poet of the very first rank. The result is some very entertaining comic poetry.

This is the best verse play I've ever read. It is in fact a translation of an 18th century play by Carlo Goldoni done by -- W.H. Auden!

Auden reaches the general public in a way most poets, especially contemporary literary poets, fail. His themes, language, rhythm, imagery and form are no less brilliant for being understood. So many of his pieces reach across decades to contemporary experience, and most general readers come to his anthologies having heard one of his poems used effectively in contemporary media. Everyone who saw "Four Weddings and a Funeral" fell in love with "Funeral Blues," which was read in the funeral scene. This volume has it.

His poem "September 1, 1939" circulated widely, especially via e-mail, as the anniversary of September 11 came around, is also attracting new interest. Unfortunately, that particular work is not included in this collection. All the same, it is a fine sampling of what Auden did across a long and prolific career. The edition has a nice physicality--a well produced hardcover, at a bargain price--perfect for leaving on the bedside or on an occasional table. This is poetry in an accessible package made for reading. It makes a good gift.

This substantial selection from Auden's poems may well help the American reader get a first impression of one of the best poets of the last century. Born in England in 1907, Auden moved to the US in 1940 and became an important influence on many American poets of his time. Unfortunately he usually seems to be regarded as too British to become part of the canon. While there is a very British sense of irony and self-deprecation in many of these poems, the feelings they express are truly universal.

What always strikes me about Auden is the musical quality of his poems and the huge number of memorable lines. There are so many verses which you won't forget although you've only read them one time or two, from the quirky:

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you / Till China and Africa meet, / And the river jumps over the mountain / And the salmon sing in the street." to the more serious: "If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me."

As these lines do already show, you do not need a dictionary do understand Auden. In contrast to the generation of Eliot and Pound before them, Auden and his friends wanted to write for the common reader and express the feelings of the people around them. Even today people can relate to this, as the Auden renaissance after the reading of one of his poems in the movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral" proved.

This book of essays is a wonderful and surprising work, by the clear-minded and perceptive poet W.H. Auden. It is not a formal methodical work, like one would expect from a critic, but rather a poetic creation that provokes thought rather than defining thoughts. Auden's way of relating all sorts of things to each other, from opera to art to Shakespeare to everyday life, makes for a very mind-refreshing read. For anyone who has an interest in literature, art, or philosophy, this is a great choice.

Great fun reading. Auden's prose style really always delights. Casual in a sense, not twist your brain all up in the ugly way that a lot of "theorists" seem to like to. It's straight talk about poetry from one of the century's tops. For sheezy, you can't lose here. Great length too. Worth it just for the first third of the book, which taught me a lot of important things. Essential for anyone who wants to write poetry in the tradition of Auden etc., the greats.

Dylan Thomas, in spite of all the hype and misinformation and gossip, still looms larger than almost any other Twentieth Century poet (only Sylvia Plath and e.e. cummings, perhaps, are comparable). And this is all the more amazing when one considers how actually small the total of his output was. To listen to him read his poetry, though, is a profound experience. His reading of "Lament", one of his greatest poems (in my opinion), is riveting. The cadence of his rich voice, with his Welsh accent and sonorous vowels, reveling in the sheer sounds and the multifarious allusions in the meaning, is unforgettable. Now if they can remaster and issue it on CD---! But it's worth suffering the technical crudities of the recording to hear this great poet and equally great reciter.

Listening to Dylan Thomas gives you some idea what he must have been like - on those late nights at the White Horse Tavern. These tapes of Thomas are brilliant.

Back in the sixties I had several copies of this book, read it, used it, sang and played from it. Books get borrowed or lent, and I distinctly recall the surviving copy falling apart and having to be held together with rubber bands.

The songs included here are the most sung numbers of Campion, Dowland, Rosseter, Morley, Jonson and others of the era 1580 to 1620 give or take a few years. Most of them were originally lute songs, but the accompaniments here are piano transcriptions. The melody line is clear cut, sung harmonies are optional, accompaniments interchangeable.

These songs are more than merely poems set to music. Music and verse are one with each other: the lyrics alone are inconsequential and slight, the music alone loses the cognitive quality the words lend it. In this epoch people were expected to sight read and improvise and to be able to turn a sonnet or verse with grace. In several languages!

So in trying to reconstruct a song each of Campion and Dowland I have been seeing these pages in my mind's eye. I found the words on line easily enough, as well as some MIDI sequencing of the tunes, but no sheet music. This I've spent an afternoon reconstructing and hoping I get it right. Of course, I'll be looking for a used copy... and, no, you may not borrow it!

This book, a collection of lute songs, part songs, and rounds with an excellent introduction by W.H. Auden, is a fine source of Elizabethan-era English music for any who wish to study it or better still attempt it. (The only drawbacks I can find are the occasional omission of verses, e.g. for "Angelus ad Virginem," though OTOH some of the quite unsingable verses of "Nova, Nova" could have been omitted, and the binding that won't lie flat.) I once could point any interested in early music at it and at the other book Noah Greenberg edited (which covered English music from a wider chunk of time). Once through with this review, I will look for W.W. Norton's web page and plead with them to reissue the paperback versions, which no home that delights in early music should be without...

...Wait! Great news: Dover has reprinted this book, under the title _An English Medieval and Renaissance Song Book: Part Songs and Sacred Music for One to Six Voices_. If you have any interest in early music, seek it out.

Professor Mendelson's book on Auden's work from the 1940s to his death in 1973 is one of the best way to appreciate the poet's later poems, prose and librettos. "Later Auden" details that there was both a public and private interpretation of much of his work, including "The Rake's Progress" written for composer Igor Stravinsky, "Age of Anxiety", and "Thanksgiving for a Habitat". By all means, if Auden appeals to you, this is a necessary book.

For any one looking for an introduction to Wystan Auden's work, there is no better way than to pick up both Early Auden and Later Auden by Edward Mendelson. Both of these books help one understand some of the more obscure aspects of Auden's poetry, and in particular, to distinguish both the personal and public parts of his work. I pick up this book again and again. I also recommend it unreservedly to anyone looking to get acquainted with one of the 20th century's most important voices.

Auden is one of the great poets of the past century and one of the greatest ever in English. This is a particularly good collection of his work. The editor, Edward Mendelson, is a leading Auden scholar and Auden's literary executor. This volume contains all of Auden's major poetry including the great short lyrics, the major longer works, and my favorite, the great China sonnet sequence. In his later years, Auden altered the text of some famous earlier poems to change wordings he felt were false. In this edition, Mendelson uses the earlier versions of these subsequently altered verses. Many prefer the early versions though I find comparisons with the amended versions published in the equally wonderful Collected Poems, also edited by Mendelson, to be very interesting. I am not sure that the amended versions are worse, just different. It contains also a particularly insightful preface by Mendelson that does a very nice job of putting Auden into the context of 20th century English poetry. This is a wonderful book for those who love Auden's work. It can be read over and over again. It is also an excellent introduction for those encountering Auden for the first time.

W. H. Auden has always been one of my favourite modern poets, and the 'Selected Poems' one of my favourite volumes of his work. While he gained popular vogue for a time following Ben Elton's film 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' (still one of the funniest films ever made), the full extent of Auden's ability is attested to in this volume, which includes some of his best loved and well recognised poems (and does not include 'Funeral Blues', the poem from 'Four Weddings' - if you're looking for that poem, try the short volume 'Tell Me the Truth About Love'). This selection by Edward Mendelson includes the original versions of poems edited by Auden later in his life, also giving a unique perspective on the early development of Auden's work.

Poetry is, of course, a very personal taste, and one man's favourite poem is another's jumble of ill-chosen words. That being said, it is difficult, to my mind, to find poems written in this century which surpass 'Oxford', 'Musée des Beaux Arts', 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats', 'Et in Arcadia Ego'...the list is practically as long as the table of contents. No matter the subject (even to something as curious as 'In Praise of Limestone'), Auden has words for us, words which are as powerful, as moving now as they were the day they were put to paper.

In short, if you are at all tempted by poetry, this volume is certainly worth your time.

Goethe comes alive as a very real person, not just the famous German author, in this travel memoir detailing the two years he spent in Italy in the 1780's. A wonderful description of travel before airplanes and cameras. Somewhat tedious descriptions of geology and of his works-in-progress are frequent, but never too long.

It might be helpful to read (or re-read) the introduction after having read part of the book (say, into the first Roman visit).

In preparation for a trip to Italy, I began reading the accounts of famous travellers to that land: D.H. Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Tobias Smollett, and now Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I had no great expectations but was knocked for a loop from page one.

Never before had I encountered a questing mind quite like Goethe's. Almost from the moment to left Carlsbad in September 1786, he was noticing the geological structures underlying the land and the flora and fauna above it. He sits down and talks with ordinary people without an attitude -- and this after he had turned the heads of half of Europe with his SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER. Here he was journeying incognito, apparently knowing the language well enough to communicate with peasants, prelates, and nobility.

One who abhors marking books I intend to keep, I found myself underlining frequently. "In this place," he writes from Rome, "whoever looks seriously about him and has eyes to see is bound to become a stronger character." In fact, Goethe spent over a year in Rome learning art, music, science, and even sufferings the pangs of love with a young woman from Milan.

Bracketing his stay in Rome is a longish journey to Naples and Sicily, where he becomes acquainted with Sir Warren Hamilton and his consort Emma, the fascinating Princess Ravaschieri di Satriano, and other German travelers. One of them, Wilhelm Tischbein, painted a wonderful portrait of Goethe the traveller shown on the cover of the Penguin edition.

The translation of W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer is truly wonderful. My only negative comments are toward the Penguin editors who, out of some pennywise foolishness, have omitted translating the frequent Latin, Greek, and French quotes. I am particularly upset about the lack of a translation of the final quote from Ovid's "Tristia." In every other respect, this book is a marvel and does not at all read like a work written some 215 years ago. It is every bit as fresh and relevant as today's headlines, only ever so much more articulate!

This was billed as a good introduction to Goethe. I don't know, since this is the first Goethe I've read--but I'm delighted. It starts as a sojourn south, with detailed notations of rocks, geologic information and topography. Don't let that deter you! His description of eating just bread and red wine on his sea voyage to Sicily (because of his rolling seasickness) had me running for a bottle Italian Barbera! As my late great aunt would have said: "A nice, nice book."

There are two separate matters to consider here: the nature of this volume of Auden's collected poems, & the poetry itself. To tackle the first issue: this is not a _Complete_ but a _Collected Poems_, & this is a crucial difference. Auden was a perpetual reviser & assembled his canon with care. As with Robert Lowell his revisions are sometimes bewildering attempts to remake himself & his work in a very public manner. Auden grew to hate many of his best & most famous poems, notably "Sir, no man's enemy", "September 1, 1939" & "Spain 1937", & these are all excluded here, along with countless others. Late in his career Auden massively revised & pruned his canon, a project that was apparently prompted by his horror at the unprincipled use of his most famous line ("We must love one another or die") by Lyndon B Johnson in a notorious 1964 t.v. ad. (He was right to distrust that line's easy quotability: in the wake of Sep 11th the poem has enjoyed renewed popularity, which is pretty bizarre for a poem with lines like "Out of the mirror they stare, / Imperialism's face / And the international wrong.") Thus this volume presents a drastically lopsided view of Auden's work, & for this reason I cannot recommend it to anyone as an introduction to Auden's work. Nearly half of this book's 927 pages is taken up by work from the late 1940s up to Auden's death in 1973, & only the most ardent admirers of Auden will be able to find much of value in the final few hundred pages, facile, prolix & chatty verse which greatly disappointed Auden's contemporaries in his lifetime & which reads no better now. Anyone actually interested in the poetry that made Auden an important & influential poet should turn to the _Selected Poems_ & _The English Auden_. The former reprints the earliest printed texts of poems; the latter the texts as they stood when Auden left for the USA. This is an important distinction, especially for one of his most famous poems, "Spain". In the _Selected_ this appears in the 1937 version, which contains a stanza referring to the need to commit "the necessary murder". Orwell viciously attacked this line in a pair of essays, dishonestly distorting it into an apologia for Stalinist purges in "Inside the Whale". Auden, probably in response to the earlier of the two essays, altered the stanza in the 1940 version (entitled "Spain, 1937"), & eventually deleted the poem from his oeuvre. Auden nonetheless (rightly) defended the original version of the line, arguing that it was an honest attempt to speak of the possibility of a "just war", against the absolutist pacificist position that all wars are wrong, while nonetheless not downplaying the brutality of war.

About the poetry I can't say enough within the space of a brief review. Auden is probably the most influential English-language poet of the 20th century, & depending on your perspective must take much of the credit or blame for the midcentury retreat in the UK & US from the modernist & avantgarde styles of the early 20th century. (For good polemical histories of this shift, take a look at Jed Resula's _The American Poetry Wax Museum_ & Keith Tuma's _Fishing by Obstinate Isles_.) Auden was probably the most technically accomplished poet of the century, & yet this is not enough: by the end the verse fell into an obsessively genial & cozy facility carefully gutted of the urgency of his earlier work. His canon is still rather in need of a strongly revisionist survey: his most famous poems are sometimes justly so (the sublime "Lullaby", one of the century's great love poems) and sometimes in need of demotion ("Musee des Beaux Arts" for instance opens with one of the most fatuous lines in all of modern poetry: "About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters."; & the elegy for Freud is like other of Auden's poems disfigured by nursery-talk & condescension). This volume makes me ultimately rather sad, that a poet with such enormous promise (the work he wrote in his early 20s is still utterly astonishing in its accomplishment & daring) never quite made good on it, & even came to hate much of his own best work. Turn to the _Selected Poems_ to get a better measure of what Auden was as a writer.

"Collected Poems" brings together Auden's greatest poetic work, which was abundant, diverse and always masterful. It's difficult to describe the breadth of his work -- emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, technically. From a purely technical standpoint, however, I've never seen as many first rate sonnets, sestinas, classical odes by one poet in one place. Auden is the only poet I've ever encountered who seems incapable of writing badly. In my humble opinion, no one surpasses him in the 20th century in the English language.

Auden is at once one of the most interesting and heartfelt poets of the 20th Century, whilst being quite underrated as one of the world's best. This volume does an exceptional job in capturing Auden's works in the way that he himself wanted them to be seen. While there are a multitude of purists who cannot abide by any poet's natural tendency to revise his works as life experiences mold his perspective, that Mendelson made the relatively bold decision to publish the augmented Auden is quite refreshing, in my view. These are the works of a man who transgressed the need for set structures, and didn't sacrifice substance for the sake of style. In essence, his poetry was the truest expression of his ideals.

In regards to the book itself, it was tastefully put together, and is a definite asset to any poetry collection. The font and paper stock are smooth and refined, making the poetry easy to read in varying degrees of light. The poems are arranged in a roughly chronological order...once again, the way that Auden himself preferred.

Considering that I own a number of old volumes of Auden's poetry --including first editions-- I can assure any potential buyer that Mendelson took no liberties with this volume. I wish other collections could claim the same.

"Ah, to find a book of a certain Wystan Hugh,
Is to find a gem in a field of residue;
It has been a long time coming, but in my hands I hold
A paper book of Auden, worth its weight in gold"