The third volume of Auden Studeis presents Auden in maturity, and includes a large amount of previously unpublished prose by him. The book concentrates on the relatively unexplored area of Auden's post-1940 writings, and the letters, essay, and lectures printed here demonstrate the Goethean scope of his intellect, which ranged easily from psychoanalysis to theology, archaeology to politics. In Solitude, for Company contains two hitherto unpublished and little-known lectures. The first of these, introduced by Nicholas Jenkins, is on the theme of vocation, delivered during the troubled war years when Auden was examining his own vocation. The second lecture was given near the end of the poet's life, on the subject of the value of the work of Sigmund Freud. Katherine Bucknell precedes this with the first full-length examination of Auden's intensely ambivalent relation to Freud. Auden's correspondence with his close friends James and Tania Stern reveals much new and important biographical information, and Edward Mendelson's further supplement to the Auden Bibliography provides an extensive listing of all published letters by Auden.
In addition, distinguished literary critics, including David Bromwich, Lawrence Lipking, Edna Longley, and Michael Wood, together with the nonagenarian communist Edward Upward, contribute to a symposium on one of this century's most famous poems, 'In Praise of Limestone'.