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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor to The Spectator,

and this week it's my great privilege to welcome the Auden Scholar Edward Mendelssohn,

who has been the executive of W.H. Audens' estate and has been working in a deep scholarly way

on the great poet for more than 50 years. He's just reached what is sort of in a sense the

summation of his work on Orden with the publication

of the final two volumes of his complete W.H. Orden, which are the poems?

W.H. Orden, Poems Volume 1 and Poems Volume 2 from Princeton University Press.

Edward, congratulations and welcome.

Warmest thanks, and I'm very glad to be here, Sam.

Now, as I say, you have been working closely and deeply on Alden for more than half a century.

I mean, I, you know, as a schoolboy falling in love with Alden, it was your selected

poems of W.H. Auden, like a old Faber russet-coloured paperback that was my way in.

And can you tell me what sustained that fascination, that, that attention that you've given

Orden for quite so long? Well, it's more or less the same thing that keeps me teaching a course

on Virginia Woolf every year and writing essays on Virginia Woolf all the time.

When you hang around a genius, you pick up good ideas. You pick up ways of thinking.

I had friends who wrote about Ezra Pound when they were writing their dissertations.

And when they got to the age of 40, they said, I never want to read a word of him ever again.

And the sense of that there were diminishing returns, you simply, you hang around Auden,

or you hang around Virginia Woolf, and you keep seeing something new about the world every time,

as well as admiring the technique, the skill, the wit, the generosity.

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