What W.H. Auden Can Do For You? (paperback)
ISBN:
9780691234533
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Publication Date:
10 May 2022
Bestselling novelist Alexander McCall Smith’s charming account of how the poet W.H. Auden has helped guide his life — and how he might guide yours, too. Now available in paperback.
In this book McCall Smith has written a charming personal account about what W.H. Auden has done for him.
Part self-portrait, part literary appreciation, the book tells how McCall Smith first came across the poet’s work in the 1070s while teaching law in Belfast. At the time, this was a violently divided city and Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’, a poem about the outbreak of World War II, resonated strongly. McCall Smith goes on to reveal how his life has related to and been inspired by other Auden poems ever since.
An enchanting story about how art can help us live, this book will appeal to McCall Smith’s fans and anyone curious about Auden.
Read more in this article by Alexander McCall Smith, written when the book was first published in hardback.
Reviews
‘Poets need readers who aren’t poets, and it is delightful to see an established novelist answer the call’
– Lachlan MacKinnon, Times Literary Supplement
‘The book comes alive when Smith connects his own moral and intellectual growth to his appreciation of the poet. . . . Anyone interested in the intellectual underpinnings of Smith’s warm and humane novels should read this book’
– Regina Marler, New York Times Book Review
What W. H. Auden Can Do for You is a graceful and personal response of gratitude for Auden, celebrating the resonance, reverence, and rebellion of the man who believed ‘truth is catholic, but the search for it is protestant’
– Mark Oakley, Church Times
‘Of all the volumes I’ve read about [Auden], and all the tributes paid, the most remarkable and in a sense the most lovable is a highly personal, 137-page book by Alexander McCall Smith, What W.H. Auden Can Do For You.’
– Robert Fulford, National Post
‘[A] thoughtful and generous guide to more than the selected poems of W.H. Auden. An uplifting, pocket-sized book it made me rethink how I read, why poetry can be relevant both to everyday life and great events and it was refreshingly illuminating on the ways we age’
– Caroline Jackson, The Tablet
‘Maybe the name of this book is the most radical, insightful thing about it: the notion that Auden is, as McCall Smith writes, ‘a healer, ‘ and that this is healing is collective. It’s not just what Auden can do for you alone, but for all of us’
– Alex Nazaryan, Newsweek
‘McCall Smith restores the link between poetry and life’
– Anthony Daniels, New Criterion
‘Again and again we return to this strange, weathered scholar poet because he helps us to live’
– Peter Rose, Sydney Morning Herald
‘A joy, start to finish’
– Philadelphia Inquirer
