Ever the schoolboy poet, whose mixed blessing it was to have authored juvenilia of such intellectual force and genius of craft that the best of his last writings must inevitably seem a trifle anticlimactic, Auden never was deserted by his adolescent brilliance; and though this may seem something of a left-handed compliment, it was actually his precocious Oxford arsenal of cleverness, cheek, voracious erudition, and ambition … that enabled him to produce a body of work more various, prolific, and substantial than that of any of his contemporaries…. Skillful practitioner of ottava rima …, of the sonnet sequence and calypso song, oratorio and eclogue, early Skeltonics and the chatty meditations of middle age, moralized landscapes and secular prayers, the spezzatura of the concealed rhyme scheme and the overtly merry Academic Graffiti, here was a poet who could make all the old fashions of verse, and the new ones of prose...