A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
A New Statesman Book of the Year
A Daily Telegraph Best Poetry Book of the Year
A Tablet Book of the Year
Mendelson is to be congratulated on this magnificent addition to our generation's definitive Auden.---John Fuller, Times Literary Supplement
A dazzling, scholarly triumph.---Michael Dirda, Washington Post
[Auden's] oeuvre has been given a new life. . . . [in these] two new and heavily annotated volumes. . . . [Mendelson's] mastery of this sprawling material is legendary.---Brad Leithauser, Wall Street Journal
Mendelson has championed a reassessment of the poet's later work. He has not achieved this through polemic, but rather through a patient and careful effort. . . . I have been reading and teaching and writing about Auden's poetry for many years, but I have taken the opportunity offered by these two volumes to try, as best I can, to encounter it all anew.---Alan Jacobs, Harper's Magazine
Glorious.---Bel Mooney, Daily Mail
[The Complete Works of W.H. Auden is] an astonishing act of literary scholarship and personal dedication on Mendelson's part, and readers the world over should be thankful for it. . . . The poems [are] strange, rich, authoritative.---Nick Laird, New York Review of Books
A complete delight.---Alexander McCall Smith, New Statesman
Worth reading.---Sam Sifton, New York Times
A remarkable editorial enterprise.---David Bromwich, Times Literary Supplement
A grand thing.---Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph
These volumes show the poetic beauty and intellectual audacity of Auden's work with a power that left me exultant.---Richard Davenport-Hines, Times Literary Supplement
Exhilaratingly prospective. . . . some of the most vivid poems ever committed to English . . . these two books are a monument to the acumen, scholarship, and perseverance of Edward Mendelson.---Ron Horning, Brooklyn Rail
Magnificent. . . . Mendelson's Auden has long been regarded as a monument of literary scholarship, and these two heavy poetry volumes complete the grounds for that acclaim. . . . An amazing thicket of scholarship and commentary draped around some of the most-studied and most-quoted poetry of the 20th century.---Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review
To read Auden's Complete Works therefore is not just to encounter the inventions of a polymathic, often ingenious writer and poet, but to enter into a 'whole climate of opinion,' to explore an age by way of one of its representative figures. . . . Edifying.---James Matthew Wilson, National Review
The new two-volume set of W. H. Auden's complete poems, meticulously assembled and presented by Edward Mendelson, is highly recommended.---David Lehman, Best American Poetry blog
This book is so good.---Michael Glover, The Tablet
Auden is not an occasional poet, nor does he prove the (in my opinion, wrongheaded and incorrect) theory that even good poets only produce a few memorable poems. This is an amazing body of work, composed by a writer who wrote his way through life, always thinking and paying attention. . . . Writers write, and Auden did. What wonderful stuff it is.---Rupert Loydell, Tears in the Fence
These two handsomely produced volumes from Princeton University Press are not only a monument to their editor's scholarship but a timely reminder of the enduring importance of poetry and, in particular, the contribution made to it by W.H. Auden.---David Cooke, The High Window
As authoritative a presentation as we are likely ever to get. . . . Wonderful books.---David Mason, Hudson Review
In a remarkable work of scholarship, editor Edward Mendelson has assembled every poem and every revision-and explains every reference. . . . For the budding or mature poet, it's indispensable. * Mosaic *
Auden can be magically conversational, charming and sophisticated, vivid, lyrical and amusing. A master of rhyme and metre, he has a brilliant range of allusions and important ideas, wisdom and moral force.---Jeffrey Meyers, PN Review
Mendelson could not have conceived a more fitting tribute to this poet than doing for Auden's work what Auden was always attempting to do for his own life: organize it intellectually into a grand system that takes in every detail and provides aesthetic satisfaction to the soul. . . . The definitive edition of Auden's poetry.---Stephen J. Schuler, Ad Fontes
[These two volumes] compiled and magisterially edited by Edward Mendelson, a leading Auden authority, should show readers what a versatile and commanding voice the poet possessed.---Andrew Rosenheim, The Tablet
Mendelson has put together an impres sively comprehensive and rigorously thor ough literary compendium that charts one of the twentieth century's most influential expat poets. * The American *
With the publication of Auden's Complete Poems, no one interested in twentieth-century poetry can fail to see that we owe Edward Mendelson an immeasurable debt.---Mary Jo Salter, Literary Matters
Edward Mendelson's two-volume collection of Auden's poems, spanning 1927 to 1973, is a welcome arrival, compiled by sage hands. . . . [Mendelson] is perhaps the poet's best reader.---Nick Ripatrazone, National Review
To this day, Auden continues to promote the poetic bar; while The Complete Works of W. H. Auden - Poems - Volume 1 (1927-1939) is confirmation of said promotion. As not only has this veritable tomb been lavishly put together, but also meticulously and superbly edited by Edward Mendelson. Inspired and terrific beyond terrific.---David Marx, David Marx Book Reviews
