The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, Volume II: Prose: 1939-1948: 2

Auden was as great an essayist and reviewer as he was a poet.What are his virtues?First, his enthusiasm for the books he thinks are good. He gives you the feeling that the book he's praising is one you have to read as soon as possible. He apparently wrote very few negative reviews, and once said that ignoring a book had the same effect as panning it, though I'm sure editors sometimes made this impossible when they thought he was the man to do the likely hatchet job.Second, his original insights, which sometimes become flights of fancy (his essay on PICKWICK PAPERS approaches the nonsensical), but has anybody ever done more justice to Dostoevsky, whom Auden despised as a man, but managed to praise with a modest damn (he approves of THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD as the "least irritating" of D's books). His description of Dostoevsky's sentimental religiosity as "creeping Jesus" is an epithet I'll not soon forget.Third, his taste for unusual and interesting books of many kinds, not just literary curiosities.Fourth, his poet's sensibility applied to all subject.The negatives have to be considered, however.Auden hijacks certain books and writes brilliant discourses of his own that are only tangentially related to the author's intention.He has a taste for the sweeping generalization, even if most of them are brilliantly original and provocative. But I could understand readers who dislike sentences that treat universal issues as if they were topical themes.Auden is eminently readable. If these authoritative volumes of his prose seem unduly expensive, they're worth every dollar or pound spent on them. Bravo!