In Solitude, for Company

The third volume of Auden Studies focuses on the later career of this major poet and intellectual, and includes a great deal of previously unpublished prose by him, as well as a selection from his letters. The writings demonstrate the Goethean scope of his intellect, which ranged easily from psychoanalysis to theology, archaeology to politics. "In Solitude, for Company" includes two unpublished and little-known lectures (one on vocation, delivered during the troubled war years when Auden was questioning his own vocation, one on Sigmund Freud). The volume also features Auden's correspondence with his close friends James and Tania Stern, which reveals new and starting biographical information. Each piece is annotated and introduced by an Auden specialist, several of whom also contribute to a symposium, included here, on Auden's great poem "In Praise of Limestone."