Wit and wisdom

‘To enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse,’ W. H. Auden wrote in 1950. The same isn’t quite true of Auden — a warehouse wouldn’t be necessary — but it has to be said that only a bookshelf of substantial proportions would be capable of accommodating the entirety of his work. Auden wrote a lot of poetry; but he wrote an awful lot of other stuff as well. That other stuff included plays (with Christopher Isherwood), opera librettos (with long-term partner Chester Kallman), song lyrics, lectures, radio broadcasts, record-sleeve notes, introductions to other writers’ work, essays, theological tracts and reams of journalism. This is the third volume of his collected prose, and it takes us only up to 1955 (Auden died in 1973). The series editor, Edward Mendelson, whose labours on the Complete Works are well into their third decade, doesn’t reveal how many volumes are still to come; perhaps it is a subject he prefers not to think about.