A selective list of literary criticism for the British poet W. H. Auden, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the Modern Language Association guidelines for web pages
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Ansen, Alan. "Indiscretions at the high table of verse: 'The great paradox about Auden is this: how can the writer of the sanest, most liberal and chaste poetry in English of the 20th century also be the crotchty, opinionated old fossicker of the Table Talk?' A review of Ansen's The Table Talk Of W. H. Auden, in The Guardian, 8/15/91
Berryman, John. Review of The Dyer's Hand, NY Review of Books, 1963
Bucknell, Katherine and Nicholas Jenkins, eds. 'The Map of All My Youth' Early Works, Friends, and Influences (Auden Studies #1, Oxford Univ. Press, 1990). Publisher's web site
Burt, Stephen and Hannah Brooks-Motl, eds. Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (Columbia Univ. Press, 2005), publisher's web site. A review, from the Washington Post, 7/3/05
Cappeluti, Jo-Anne. "Thank you, fog: W. H. Auden as presiding genius." On Auden's apostrophe to the fog. Renascence, Summer 1997
Colburn, Nadia Herman. "The surface of what's there: The paradox of authority in the work of W. H. Auden, John Ashbery and James Merrill." PhD dissertation, Columbia, 2004
Cunningham, Valentine. A review of British Writers of the Thirties. First page of article only. Reviewed by Robert S. Baker, in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 97-103
Farman, Dorothy J. A review of Auden in Love, in The Guardian, 3/21/85
Fenton, James. "Auden's Enchantment," a wide-ranging review of major books on W. H. Auden, in the NY Review of Books, April 13, 2000, available for $3 or by subscription.
Gopnik, Adam. "The Double Man: Why Auden is an indispensable poet of our time." On the second volume of Princeton University Press's complete edition of Auden's prose, Prose: Volume II, 1939-1948, edited by Edward Mendelson. New Yorker, 9/23/02
Gottlieb, Susannah Young-Ah. "'Reflection on the right to will': Auden's 'Canzone' and Arendt's notes on willing." "Does God ever judge us by appearances? I suspect that he does." Comparative Literature, Spring 2001
Grass, Sean C. "W. H. Auden, from Spain to 'Oxford.'" First page of article only. South Atlantic Review, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Winter, 2001), pp. 84-101
Greenberg, Herbert. A review of Greenberg's Quest for the Necessary: W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness. Also reviewed, Auden's Poetry by Justin Replogle. Reviewed by Samuel Hynes in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Winter, 1970), pp. 98-103. Only first page is available
Hamilton, Craig A. "Mapping the mind and the body: on W. H. Auden's personifications," in Style, Fall, 2002
Hannah, Sarah. "Only through time: Structure and temporality in three modern sequence poems" [T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden]. PhD dissertation, Columbia, 2005
Harries, Rt Rev Lord Harries of Pentregarth. "The Christian Reticence of W H Auden," transcript of a talk given Jan. 15, 2009, at Gresham College, London.
Jenkins, Nicholas. "Historical as Munich: Auden at 100: Who is he now?" Times Literary Supplement, 2/12/07
Jenkins, Nicholas. "The Travelling Auden." On W. H. Auden's various residences and travels, in W. H. Auden Society Newsletter, 24 (July 2004), 7-14
Kirsch, Arthur, ed. A review of Lectures on Shakespeare by W. H. Auden, edited by Arthur Kirsch. Reviewer Frank Kermode notes of Auden's lecture style, "Auden was by this time a practised lecturer, and his unprofessorial manner on the platform appealed strongly to his audiences, which were large - as many, it is said, as five hundred. Somebody remarked that the crowd couldn't have been more enthusiastic if Shakespeare had been lecturing on Auden." From London Review of Books, Vol. 23 No. 4, 22 February 2001. Also, A NY Times review, by William Logan, 2/11/01; The first chapter of Lectures on Shakespeare
Kimball, Roger. "The permanent Auden." A lengthy article attempts to define Auden's poetic stature. The New Criterion Vol. 17, No. 9 (May 1999)
Malhadas, Zióle Zanotto. "The Gift of Creativity in Two Poems by W. H. Auden" ["The Composer," "The Novelist"]. Journal article, library only. Revista Letras, 1981; 30: 139-152.
Mendelson, Edward. Publisher's web site for the projected eight-volume edition of The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, Princeton Univ. Press
Mendelson, Edward. "Clouseau Investigates Auden." Professor Mendelson sets the record straight about Auden's possible connection with the flight of the Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. Note at Auden Society, 2007
Mendelson, Edward. National Public Radio presentation on W. H. Auden, includes Professor Mendelson discussing "Funeral Blues," 2/21/07
Mendelson, Edward. Brief video lecture by Professor Mendelson, who objects to the way politicians have misused language from Auden's poem "Sept. 1, 1939."
Mendelson, Edward. A review of Mendelson's Early Auden (Viking, 1981). Reviewed by Lucy McDiarmid in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 94-96
Mendelson, Edward. A review of Mendelson's Later Auden (1999). Reviewed by Adam Kirsch in NY Observer, 5/2/99, who writes, "Probably no one alive knows Auden's poetry and prose better than Mr. Mendelson, and it shows: His close readings are always meticulous and insightful, and he draws detailed connections between what Auden read and what he wrote. Later Auden is invaluable for a complete understanding of Auden, and it should be kept on the shelf right next to the Collected Poems." Another review, by Margaret Rees, November 1999, World Socialist Web Site
O'Neill, Michael. A review of Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem. Says reviewer Robert J. Griffin, O'Neill's thesis is that "self-reflexivity in poetry is an index of aesthetic achievement." Reviewed in Criticism, Summer, 1999. Another review, by Seamus Perry in Romanticism on the Net 12 (Nov. 1998)
O'Neill, Michael. The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007) Publisher's web site
O'Neill, Michael. A substantial introduction to W. H. Auden from the Literary Encyclopedia
Parini, Jay and Brett Candlish Millier. On Auden's poems about art and artists written before his departure for New York: "Rimbaud," "A. E. Housman," "The Novelist," "The Composer," "Edward Lear," and "Musée des Beaux Arts." In "American Auden," The Columbia History of American Poetry (Columbia Univ. Press, 1993). Preview at Google Books.
Smith, Stan. "The Dating of Auden's 'Who Will Endure' and the Politics of 1931." First page of article only. The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 41, No. 163 (Aug., 1990), pp. 351-362
Tranter, John. John Tranter reviews Auden, by Richard Davenport-Hines (William Heinemann, 1995).
Wetzsteon, Rachel T. "Influential ghosts: A study of Auden's sources" [W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Soren Kierkegaard]. PhD dissertation, Columbia, 1999
Bucknell, Katherine, ed. A review of W. H. Auden: Juvenilia - Poems 1922-28, in The Guardian, 7/31/94
Bucknell, Katherine. "In praise of a guilty genius: Britain has a curious ambivalence towards the poet and critic W. H. Auden, in part since he 'abandoned' England for the US in the 1930s." Centenary article on W. H. Auden, in The Guardian, 2/4/07
The W. H. Auden Society provides basic information including news and a list of books, and access to some of their newsletter articles. It also supplies their updated, corrected, and approved version of the Wikipedia entry on W. H. Auden and recommends using it through their site, which cannot be tampered with, rather than through the Wiki site
"Auden at 100," by Meghan O'Rourke. She notes of Auden, who died at age 67, "it is tempting to imagine that it wasn't the drugs and liquor that prematurely aged him, but his literary aesthetic itself: the mantle of moral and political responsibility he believed came with the job of being a poet." Slate, 3/1/07
Regarding a new edition of the poems, W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (Faber, 2007), reviewer Ian Sansom remarks, "Auden was so ambitious, so rootless, so restless, so wide-ranging in his interests that his work becomes vulnerable to every criticism and attack." The Guardian, 3/12/07
Brief comments by critic Dana Gioia about why he first liked W. H. Auden
"Auden on Bin Laden." On the relevance of W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939" to the attacks on September 11, 2001. By Eric McHenry in Slate, 9/20/01
A short biography of W. H. Auden from the BBC
An introduction to W. H. Auden from his publisher
A short entry from the British Library indicating that they have extensive W. H. Auden documents
A brief biography of W. H. Auden from the Academy of American Poets
A 1936 review by Basil de Selincourt of Look, Stranger! Poems by W. H. Auden, in The Guardian
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