Auden came close to a point where he no longer understood his own poetry…. [Something] happened that made him close his mind, not to the earliest poetry so much as to that of the middle 'thirties. The Collected Poems … omits much and alters a good deal of what is retained. This supplementary volume [The English Auden], however, contains all the poetry of the specified period, the text being "in the form it reached at the end of 1939."… (p. 609)

[The English Auden], though it in no way matches the idea people of my age must have as to how an Auden collection should look, is nothing like as hideous as Collected Poems, which seems to have been designed as part of a plot to stop people reading Auden. I myself am not quite old enough to have been part of the original audience of Poems, but I read Look...