In his great elegy for the psychologist Sigmund Freud, W. H. Auden wrote that Freud was “no more a person / Now but a whole climate of opinion.” The 20th century saw a fair number of writers and thinkers whose life and works seemed to follow the great narrative of their time and who, in turn, seemed to shape the age through which they lived. Among poets writing in English, however, we can say this only of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Auden himself. To read Auden’s Complete Works therefore is not just to encounter the inventions of a polymathic, often ingenious writer and poet, but to enter into a “whole climate of opinion,” to explore an age by way of one of its representative figures.
