Professor Edward Mendelson of Columbia University now seems to own Auden country. The poet’s literary executor, he has edited The English Auden, the convenient selected Auden (Knopf), Complete Poems (Vintage), and now has well in hand the vast Auden Project underway at Princeton. Though the Princeton Hydrogen Fusion Project is on hold because of funding problems, the Auden Project moves smoothly ahead. Of The Complete Works of Auden, we so far have had Plays and Other Dramatic Writings 1928–1938; Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings 1939–1973; two volumes of the complete Auden poems are forthcoming. The latest offering, Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse. Volume I : 1926–1938,¹ is the first of four volumes of the poet’s miscellaneous prose.

Obviously the sheer scale is overwhelming, and, to begin with, four things should be said about this volume: (1) Professor Mendelson is a splendid editor, helpful and never intrusive; (2) that Auden wrote in such quantity is amazing; he must have been writing even while taking a shower; (3) this volume, just conceivably, will be of interest to biographers, historians, and other scholars; and (4) its interest as literature approaches zero.

Auden sent home a couple of banal descriptions of Spain and soon returned to England thoroughly disillusioned by what he had seen, but reticent in talking about it.

The two most substantial items here are Letter from Iceland, with Louis MacNeice (1936), and Journey to a