The third volume of Auden Studies presents Auden in maturity, and includes much previously unpublished prose by him, as well as a selection from his letters. The book concentrates on the relatively unexplored area of Auden's post-1940 writings, and the letters, essay, and lectures here demonstrate the scope of his intellect, which ranged easily from psychoanalysis to theology, archaeology to politics. Leading scholars and critics contribute discussions about many important aspects of the later career of this major poet and intellectual.

For many W. H. Auden is the indispensable modern poet, and in this centenary year of his birth, the influential Auden scholar Nicholas Jenkins asks, how did Auden begin? Jenkins’s young Auden is a war-shadowed poet of No Man’s Land–like moors and crumbling houses where, in the 1920s, a struggle for survival rages through the English psyche. This crisis led the country to a search for a closed-off, internally reintegrated culture, an “island” life. Correspondingly, Auden celebrated rural enclaves where a spiritual regeneration might begin. Jenkins controversially claims that in this period Auden was no socialist but a poetic Little Englander who admitted a “tendency to National Socialism.” An Outcast of the Island is an erudite, imaginative account of how a great poet’s career opened. It is also a parable about the afterlife of modernism and a portrait of an entre deux guerres society “where nobody is well.” Informed by analyses of the influence of figures such as the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, and by new, revelatory archival material by and about Auden, his milieux, and his love life, this book offers highly original, accessible readings of Auden’s extraordinary poetry. Jenkins’s book ends in 1937 in Buckingham Palace, where George VI gave Auden a medal. It was a laying-on of hands as English culture accepted him as the voice of the insular national spirit. The first phase of Auden’s career ended at that moment—in a blaze of ignominious success.

The second volume in the Auden Studies series, 'The Language of Learning and the Language of Love', focuses on the first decade of Auden's literary career and considers his experiences both as a public figure and a private individual. It contains previously unpublished or uncollected poems and prose by Auden - all with scholarly introductions and annotation. The volume reveals how Auden, as poet, teacher, and dramatist, battled with his literary ancestors, experienced love, and devised a rhetoric to express both homosexual feelings and artistic impulses. Contributions to Auden Studies 2 include poems, songs, and a piece of early travel writing introduced by Auden's new biographer, the historian Richard Davenport-Hines. Lyrics offered to Benjamin Britten as cabaret songs are presented by Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed, and Nicholas Jenkins. Also in the volume is a fascinating array of essays about Auden by leading scholars in the field, including Stan Smith and Katherine Bucknell, and the German scholar and close friend of Auden, David Luke. A further Supplement to Bloomfield and Mendelson's magisterial Auden Bibliography of 1972 is supplied by Edward Mendelson. 'The Language of Learning and the Language of Love' will be of immense interest to all readers of W. H. Auden and of twentieth-century poetry.

This is the first volume in a new series on the work of the poet W. H. Auden. The volume contains a large amount of Unpublished material by Auden, notably six poems written in German in the early 1930s, translated here by the poet and scholar David Constantine, as well as the complete version of the important early essay, `Writing', with a new foreword by its original editor Naomi Mitchison. There are substantial selections from Auden's letters to Stephen Spender and to E. R. Dodds and Mrs Dodds: these are the first Auden letters to receive a scholarly presentation with full annotation. Also in the volume are essays about Auden and his mentors and contemporaries, by leading scholars in the field such as Valentine Cunningham, John Fuller, Julian Symons, and Stan Smith, as well as by outstanding newcomers. For bibliophiles, there is advice on collecting Auden's works, and Edward Mendelson has contributed a Supplement to his comprehensive W. H. Auden: A Bibliography, 1924-1969.