The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Poems Vol I: 1927-1939, Vol II: 1940-1973
(PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 848 PP, £48 per volume)
Tablet bookshop price £43.20 • tel 020 7799 4064

The dead are entirely at the mercy of the living when it comes to the ­publication of editions of their collected poems. And the living, of course, often dislike the very idea of their work being collected. Seamus Heaney can be included in that ­category – he felt that to publish an edition of his collected poems during his own lifetime would amount to a kind of signing off, an admission that the spring had run dry. More egotistical and vainglorious types loved ­setting them going because they were a sure indication of fame and status – Robert Graves, for example, published at least three editions of his collected poems before he died.