Jarrell's witty, pointed, and long-lost lectures trace the evolution of Auden's style from the late 1920s to the early 1950s and examine the ideas and contexts that animated his poetry, including psychoanalysis, leftist politics, and Christian theology. Delivered at Princeton University in 1952, these six lectures offer new insights into Auden's poetry, particularly his long poems, and Jarrell's own work as critic and poet.

''To read Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden is to read the best-equipped of American critics of poetry of the past century on the best-equipped of its Anglo-American poets, and we rush to read, perhaps, less out of an academic interest in fair judgment than out of a spectator's love of virtuosity in flight.'' From Adam Gopnik's foreword

Randall Jarrell was one of the most important poet-critics of the past century, and the poet who most fascinated and infuriated him was W. H. Auden. In Auden, Jarrell found a crucial poetic influence that needed to be both embraced and resisted. During the 1940s, Jarrell wrestled with Auden's work, writing a series of notorious articles on Auden that remain admired and controversial examples of devoted and contentious criticism. While Jarrell never completed his proposed book on Auden, these previously unpublished lectures revise and reprise his earlier articles and present new insights into Auden's work. Delivered at Princeton University in 1951 and 1952, Jarrell's lectures reflect a passionate appreciation of Auden's work, a witty attack from an informed opponent, and an important document of a major poet's reception.

Jarrell's lectures offer readings of many of Auden's works, including all of his long poems, and illuminate his singular use of a variety of stylistic registers and poetic genres. In the lecture based on the article ''Freud to Paul,'' Jarrell traces the ideas and ideologies that animated and, at times, overwhelmed Auden's poetry. More precisely, he considers the influence of left-liberal politics, psychoanalytic and evolutionary theory, and the idiosyncratic Christian theology that characterized Auden's poems of the 1940s.

While an admiring and sympathetic reader, Jarrell does not avoid identifying Auden's poetic failures and political excesses. He offers occasionally blistering assessments of individual poems and laments Auden's turn from a cryptic, feeling, impassioned poet to a rhetorical, self-conscious one. Stephen Burt's introduction provides a backdrop to the lectures and their reception and importance for the history of modern poetry.

Stephen Burt is assistant professor of English at Macalester College. He is the author of Randall Jarrell and His Age and Popular Music, a collection of poems. His reviews and essays on poetry have appeared in several journals, including the Boston Review, London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.

This volume may be slim, but it is substantial, a happy addition to Jarrell's criticism.

Jarrell was enthralled, dazzled and infuriated by Auden... and these lectures... encompass both his admiration and his reservation.

Jon Tribble:
This collection is first-rate scholarship... Jarrell is more than a virtuoso performing here.

This set of critical engagements, published here for the first time, allows one to start right in the middle of two mid-century titans.

J. D. McClatchy:
W. H. Auden's debut as a poet, in 1928, was the most prodigious since Byron's. When he arrived on the American scene in 1939, he continued to dazzle readers in this country--none more so than Randall Jarrell, who had been reading and admiring him from the start. Auden's triumphal march across the next decade, though, began to disconcert Jarrell, and these Princeton lectures are the record of his mixed feelings. His readings are bracing, and his conclusions misjudged, but where else will one encounter a major poet so intimately engaged with the work of another? We're told that, informed of Jarrell's attacks. Auden merely shrugged, "I think Jarrell must be in love with me," and in a crucial sense he was right.