It's tempting, when trying to give a sense of H.L. Mencken's place in American literature, to reach for lofty comparisons. Alistair Cooke called him the American Voltaire; he was also a popularizer of ideas like Shaw, a foe of religion like Nietzsche, and a lexicographer like Dr. Johnson. Edmund Wilson, whose own polymathic career would have been impossible without Mencken's example, wrote in 1921 that "Mencken is the civilized consciousness of America, its learning, its intelligence and its taste, realizing the grossness of its manners and mind and crying out in horror and chagrin."

But unlike those great writers, who managed to build lasting monuments on the swamp-ground of punditry, Mencken wrote very little that survives. He was a titan among journalists, working for 50 years on the Baltimore Sun , The Smart Set and the American Mercury ; but as he admitted, "my existing books, in fact, are all bad. I am at my best in articles, written in heat and printed at once." And a taste of his work is enough to satisfy most readers' appetites: a few book reviews, a handful of editorials, a couple of columns and a brisk stroll through the memoirs. Only an addict would think of poring through all six volumes of Prejudices , and even an addict might hesitate before Treatise on the Gods or Notes on Democracy . For everything about Mencken, from the industrial bulk of his production to the twitchy gusto of his prose, to the irresponsibility of his ideas, reveals a writer who did not take himself quite seriously enough. If Mencken was a literary artist (to borrow his quip about Dr. Johnson), then a cornet-player is a musician.

Terry Teachout's excellent new biography succeeds by taking Mencken for what he's worth and not demanding more. The Skeptic is blessedly brisk, considering the sheer length of Mencken's career and the abundance of his opinions, and remarkably judicious. Mr. Teachout writes that "unlike Mencken's previous biographers, I write, very broadly speaking, from his point of view"-which is to say, he doesn't dismiss out of hand Mencken's strong libertarian and anti-egalitarian views. And his sympathetic exposition of those views makes his censure of Mencken's shortcomings, as a man and a writer, all the more credible.

Though he lived through two world wars and the Great Depression, the essence of Mencken's philosophy never changed. One of its pithiest statements can be found in his landmark essay "The National Letters": "[The] lower orders are inert, timid, inhospitable to ideas, hostile to changes, faithful to a few maudlin superstitions. All progress goes on on the higher levels …. This, indeed, is at once the hall-mark and the justification of an aristocracy-that it is beyond responsibility to the general masses of men, and hence superior to both their degraded longings and their no less degraded aversions."

This is hardly a novel creed: It's equal parts social Darwinism, Nie-tzschean elitism and Republican laissez-faire . That it satisfied Mencken for so long with so little modification is due, as Mr. Teachout shows, largely to the conclusions he drew from his own life. Born in 1880 to a Baltimore tobacco-merchant with no interest in high culture, Mencken was badly educated and sent as a teenager into the family business. But he was innately bookish, and he dreamed of being a reporter. One of the most poignant and revealing documents in The Skeptic is Mencken's application to a journalism correspondence school: "Age? 19. Occupation? Clerical work in factory. Time to devote to literary work? 4 hours a day." Mencken lifted himself from this intellectual proletarianism to an unparalleled height of literary reputation and influence, and did it entirely by his own efforts. The lesson, to him at least, was obvious: Those who succeed deserve all the credit for their success, and all its fruits; those who fail deserve mockery and contempt.

Everything good in Mencken stems from this proud root: his love of liberty, his hatred of superstition, his high literary standards. In the 1910's, as columnist and then co-editor (with George Jean Nathan) of The Smart Set , he demanded that American writers produce a literature worthy of their civilization. In the 1920's, as editor of the American Mercury , he took aim at the rich targets of the Jazz Age, from plutocracy to Babbittry to fundamentalism. His attacks were fierce and intemperate-when William Jennings Bryan died in his sleep five days after the Scopes "monkey trial," Mencken told his friends, "We killed the son-of-a-bitch"-but that only made them more delightful.

Mencken's narrowness, his lack of a truly cultured mind, meant that his ideas remained on the level of prejudices. He hailed robust realists like Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, but as Mr. Teachout writes, when the modernists of the 1920's came along, he greeted them "as if they were merely another species of boob." He lampooned American politicians as corrupt morons, but when the crisis of the Depression approached he could not grasp its seriousness, saw nothing in F.D.R. and the New Deal but charlatanism, and wrote in 1933: "If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object." Another sign of his crankiness was his growing anti-Semitism. Though he had many Jewish friends and colleagues, he could not conceal his revulsion at Jews in general: "[T]hey have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom."

Mr. Teachout is unsparing about all of these failures, yet he finally finds Mencken an irresistible figure: "He was to the first part of the twentieth century what Mark Twain was to the last part of the nineteenth-the quintessential voice of American letters." Mr. Teachout shrewdly notes that "such praise would have been repulsive to a man who fancied himself a member of the international aristocracy of superior beings, but the passing of time has made it easier to see how very American he was." Perhaps the point deserves to be underlined that Mencken, if he was quintessentially American, was American above all in his too-easy acceptance of the second-rate. He may have been just the Voltaire we deserve.

Adam Kirsch's first book of poetry, The Thousand Wells (Ivan R. Dee), was published this October.

Globalization, we often hear, is making every place identical, Jakarta just another version of Toronto. But in poetry, at least, cities are guaranteed their own distinctive lives. Literature preserves them at the moment not necessarily of their greatest wealth or power, but of their first maturity. Rome remains the aristocratic, rivalrous city of Catullus and Horace; London is still the Augustan clubland of Pope and Swift. In both cases, what makes them metropolitan is a sense of centrality: The poets declare that civilization exists here , in this small society of writers and readers who probably know each other by name.

New York's great age of poetry was, roughly speaking, from 1870 to 1970. Of course, as Elizabeth Schmidt's excellent new anthology shows, good poems are still being written here. But the classical, mythical New York was created by the line of poets running from Walt Whitman to Hart Crane to Frank O'Hara. And just as America, even in its imperial phase, is unlike the empires Rome and London ruled, so New York has called forth a very different poetry. It's urban but not urbane, if urbanity means polish, sophistication, elegance. Instead, it's all movement, potential, indefiniteness, longing-isolated, but yearning for ultimate connection. This explains why the best New York poems are about sex, and even, perhaps, why New York's three greatest bards were gay: Erotic attraction, especially to strangers, is an enduringly apt symbol of the city's democratic promise.

Poems of New York , a new entry in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, succeeds extraordinarily well in capturing the major strands of New York poetry. Part of the charm of the book is simply in the details, the familiar things transformed by metaphor. In Charles Reznikoff's "Walk About the Subway Station," we recognize the "flat black fungus / that was chewing gum"; in Howard Moss' "The Roof Garden," we see the water towers, like "an African village suspended above / The needle hardness of New York." Even vanished facts come back to life, as in Karl Shapiro's "Future-Present": "Remember the old days when the luxury liners in narrow Manhattan / appeared piecemeal in segments at the end of east-west streets … ?"

When it comes to the city as a whole, however, the anthology offers two dueling visions. In "Whitman in Black," Ted Berrigan writes of "Whitman's city lived in in Melville's senses." Melville and Whitman represent two ways of seeing, and writing about, the city: threat or seduction, loss of nature or gain of culture, nightmare or paradise. Ms. Schmidt takes care to represent both. Melville's New York appears in "The House-Top," a poem describing the Civil War draft riots: "The Town is taken by its rats-ship-rats / And rats of the wharves." This vision resurfaces in Berrigan's "urban inferno," where he lives "for my sins."

Many of the writers in Poems of New York see the city this way. There's Federico García Lorca: "Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth / because morning and hope are impossible there." There's Muriel Rukeyser's "Seventh Avenue": "This is the cripples' hour on Seventh Avenue / when they emerge, the two o'clock night-walkers, / the cane, the crutch, and the black suit." More recently, there's Cornelius Eady's "Dread": "If you're a young man in East New York, / Here's a simple fact of life: / If they don't shoot with a gun, / They'll cut you with a knife."

No one could deny that these poets see a crucial aspect of New York. Yet in these poems they somehow fail to define the anthology, or the city. Partly this is because they are inferior as poetry, with more sincerity than art, and a strong flavor of the sermon and newspaper editorial. Partly it's because New York's victims struggle to leave, while true believers keep on coming. But more important, it's because urban suffering can be just as bad in Chicago or San Diego, while the delights of New York are unique.

That uniqueness comes across clearly in Poems of New York : It's the city's intoxicating liberation, its combination of anonymity and potential. This is much better reflected in New York's poetry than its fiction, which tends to focus on "society," as in Wharton and James. The poets, on the other hand, are arrivistes, and they adore what they have found. For the women poets of the early 20th century, New York's sexual freedom called forth a melodramatic and rather self-conscious braggadocio. Sara Teasdale daringly envies "the girls who can ask for love / In the lights of Union Square," and Amy Lowell boasts, "I am like to be very drunk / with your coming." The poetess laureate of these is Edna St. Vincent Millay, with the famous "Recuerdo" ("We were very tired, we were very merry").

For the best expression of this freedom, however, we must turn to Whitman, Crane and O'Hara. They each offer a different version of the city's delighted energy. O'Hara's is eminently sociable and comic: He gives us the sense (also found in Catullus) that the poet has a really attractive group of friends. Many of O'Hara's poems would belong in this anthology; Ms. Schmidt has chosen "Gamin" and "Steps," where even a traffic jam is eroticized as "a way / for people to rub up against each other."

Whitman, of course, is the poet of "Mannahatta" and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," both of which are included. Whitman shows how simply walking down a New York street is an erotic experience:

Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,

Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word ….

But Hart Crane is the essential poet of New York, because he best combines both strains: He fears the city almost as much as he loves it. He takes note of the revolving doors "Where boxed alone a second, eyes take fright," and of the subway bathroom, where love is "A burnt match skating in a urinal"-a perfect image of disgusted satiety. But he was also, from his Brooklyn Heights apartment, the visionary singer of the Brooklyn Bridge, a massive emblem of potential: "Some motion ever unspent in thy stride- / Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!"

Poems of New York , then, is not just a delightful book to read; it reminds us, in difficult times, of what New York really means. This is not accomplished by the poems relating to Sept. 11, which still feel too raw and testimonial. It succeeds, rather, by showing us that the city, which so often seems to belong merely to its owners, really belongs to the poets, and to anyone who shares Marianne Moore's credo: "it is not the plunder, / but 'accessibility to experience.'"

Adam Kirsch's first book of poems, The Thousand Wells (Ivan R. Dee), will be published this fall.

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde , edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. Henry Holt, 1,270 pages, $45.

When Oscar Wilde landed at New York harbor on Jan. 2, 1882, he had written almost nothing. The works on which his reputation now rests- The Picture of Dorian Gray , Salome , The Importance of Being Earnest , the critical essays-all lay at least seven years in the future; his trial and imprisonment, which secured his legend, were still undreamed of. Yet Wilde, at the age of 27, was already famous, and had been for several years. "What has he done, this young man," asked the great actress Modjeska, "that one meets him everywhere?" He didn't need to do anything; he was, in fact, the first modern celebrity, famous simply for being famous. "I have nothing to declare but my genius," he is reputed to have said to the customs officials in New York. And as he told André Gide, he had put all his genius into his life, leaving merely his talent for his work.

Wilde discovered early on that the age, prudish and decadent by turns, had an appetite for his brand of wit-paradoxical, frivolous, provocative. He yearned for its approval: "I am working at dramatic art because it's the democratic art, and I want fame," he confided in a letter as early as 1880. And The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde , published on Nov. 30, the 100th anniversary of his death, is perhaps the best single record of Wilde's journey towards fame, and past it into infamy. It takes its place with Richard Ellmann's 1987 biography as the essential book for understanding Wilde. A massive work of scholarship, the fruit of decades of work by Rupert Hart-Davis and Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland, it does not much add to Wilde's literary reputation: With the exception of De Profundis , the long self-dramatizing letter Wilde wrote to Alfred Douglas from prison, these letters were not meant for posterity. But for that very reason, they give a powerful, immediate impression of his daily existence.

America set the seal on Wilde's celebrity. His lecture tour was a publicist's stroke of genius: Richard D'Oyly Carte, the theatrical producer, sent him to drum up publicity for Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience , in which Wilde was caricatured as the aesthetic poet Bunthorne. He was happy to dress the part. As Barbara Belford writes in her new biography, Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius : "He strode onstage with a circular black cloak thrown over one shoulder, walking slowly to model the knee breeches and black stockings worn with a lace-trimmed shirt under a dark purple coat lined in lavender satin." A hesitant speaker at first, Wilde soon learned to tailor his lectures to his audience: He gave decorating hints in "The House Beautiful" and puffed the pre-Raphaelites in "The English Renaissance."

New York fell for him, as he wrote with glee to Mrs. George Lewis, the wife of his solicitor: "The hall had an audience larger and more wonderful than even Dickens had. I was recalled and applauded and am now treated like the Royal Boy …. Yesterday I had to leave by a private door, the mob was so great. Loving virtuous obscurity as I do, you can judge how much I dislike this lionising, which is worse than that given to Sarah Bernhardt I hear."

His success was so great that he ended up staying in America for all of 1882, traveling from Boston to San Francisco and back again. Ms. Belford gives the tour comparatively little space, and indeed leaves out entirely one of its most significant episodes, which can be traced in the Letters . On the train from Philadelphia to Baltimore, Wilde ran into another one of Carte's lecturers, a bluff war correspondent named Archibald Forbes, and quarreled with him. Forbes retaliated by mocking Wilde in his lecture, sneering at "the aesthetic ecstasy" and pluming himself on his manliness: "I glanced down at my clothes, which I had not changed for two weeks, and in which I had ridden 150 miles," Forbes boasted. "I did not look much like an art object then." The New York papers, predictably, inflated the quarrel, and letters flew back and forth: Forbes attacked Wilde's "utterly mercenary aim" in coming to America, while Wilde complained to George Lewis of Forbes' "attack on me … one of the most filthy and scurrilous things I ever read." It was an early warning that John Bull was willing to put up with Wilde only to a point; the newspapers' fascination with him could turn at a moment's notice into mockery and abuse.

Ms. Belford's life of Wilde moves briskly through its high points-books and plays, love affairs and scandals-and does not omit any of the famous bons mots. But it has little new information to add, and can't compete with the Ellmann biography for completeness or insight. Without a firm grasp of Wilde's literary and intellectual background, Ms. Belford can offer little in the way of elucidating his "certain genius." Her greatest strength is that she is more candid than earlier biographers about Wilde's homosexuality, especially in his last years, after his release from prison.

In his youth, Wilde's love of men was sublimated, in the classic Oxford style, into Platonic friendship. He courted several young women, including one who went on to become Mrs. Bram Stoker. In 1884, he married Constance Lloyd. His letters as a newlywed are perhaps a little too conscious of what he ought to be feeling: "We are of course desperately in love …. I am perfectly happy." Sometime in 1886 or 1887, he had his first homosexual experience, with Robert Ross, a friend who later became his literary executor; from then on, his interest in Constance diminished rapidly.

The great love of his life, of course, was Lord Alfred Douglas, known as "Bosie." Ms. Belford, though acknowledging that Douglas was "vain, shallow, and, when enraged, vindictive," attempts to soften his image, in particular denying the charge that his presence was fatal to Wilde's writing. Wilde himself changed his mind a hundred times about Douglas' character, alternately worshipping him and swearing off him forever. He should have done so while he had the chance. In February 1895, just as The Importance of Being Earnest was taking the stage in London, Douglas' demented father, the Marquis of Queensberry, left the famous card at Wilde's club: "For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite [sic]." Douglas, who hated his father more than he loved Wilde, encouraged Wilde to sue for libel; a fatally foolish decision, since the two men well knew that the charge was true. Queensberry's lawyer dredged up several "renters" who could testify to having sex with Wilde, and he had to drop the case after two days. He was arrested the same night, convicted of "gross indecency" and sentenced to prison for two years.

Ms. Belford is generally good on the details of the trials, which remain, after a century, depressing and sordid to read about. One of the key pieces of testimony against Wilde was, as she writes, "from chambermaids at the Savoy who thought they found fecal stains on bedsheets alleged to be from Wilde's room." Blackmailing prostitutes crawled out of the woodwork-the trial, as Wilde's lawyer said, was "an act of indemnity for all the blackmailers in London"-but the judge found Wilde far more objectionable than his accusers. "It is the worst case I have ever tried," he thundered. "People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them."

Prison and its sequel-Wilde's three years of wandering exile in France and Italy-are outwardly the least active parts of Wilde's life, but morally the most dramatic. His was a genius that battened off fame, that required attention and applause; now he was deprived of family, friends and public all at a stroke. The letters from this period are heartbreaking, as we observe Wilde's desperate attempts to come to terms with his fall, to remake his life on a new basis. He grows increasingly desperate, badgering his friends for money and accusing them of vague embezzlements; he quickly gave up the idea of writing a new play, though he continued to accept advances from producers.

It is the saddest act of Wilde's tragedy, but Ms. Belford finds some consolation: For the first time, Wilde was free to be open about his sexuality. "When he threw away the mask and stopped the lies, he was strangely happy." He could even make epigrams about the "vice" that ruined his life: "A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys."

But this was a reduced kind of happiness, a meager consolation. "I have pleasures, and passions," he wrote in 1898, "but the joy of life is gone." Wilde's remains now lie in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, under a Jacob Epstein monument inscribed with a verse from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." But a letter he wrote three years before his death provides his best epitaph: "I was a problem for which there was no solution."

Adam Kirsch is a poet and critic living in New York City.

Mary McCarthy was a tactician of scandal; she had a sure sense of just how much would be good for her. She learned this early on. In her freshman English class at Vassar, students' papers were kept in a folder in the library for classmates to read; one of them, Lucille Fletcher Wallop, remembers the effect of McCarthy's compositions: "I learned from her short stories that deviled ham was fatal to a proper orgasm and that lettuce was a powerful aphrodisiac. I had never heard of orgasms or aphrodisiacs, but I lapped up her descriptions, as did the rest of the class, who often lined up in a long queue waiting for the folder."

Fifty years later, when she told Dick Cavett in a television interview that every word Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including "and" and "the," she didn't expect to be sued for libel; but when Herbert Mitgang first told her about the suit, the idea of the scandal didn't displease her: "I laughed," she remembered. "He said, 'You won't laugh when I tell you it's for two and a quarter million dollars.' I think I did laugh again."

Seeing Mary Plain , Frances Kiernan's semi-oral biography, is punctuated by such affairs; they are, with her books, McCarthy's gift to posterity. More: Her writing and her life converged, and were often interesting for the same reason and in the same way. The best-known facts of her biography are her lovers and her husbands; her best-known fictions are "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" and the "pessary" episode from The Group , both programmatically, scandalously honest about sex. And, of course, her novels are buckets drawn from the well of personal anecdote: The scheming professors of The Groves of Academe , the confused alumnae of The Group , all have identifiable "originals." She wrote and rewrote her memoirs several times.

All this makes McCarthy an ideal subject for an oral biography. As time passes, it becomes clearer that she was a fine writer but not a literary artist; she did not achieve (or necessarily attempt) the promotion from talk to writing, from life to work, that artists aim for, and so it is fitting that talk should memorialize her. Unfortunately, Seeing Mary Plain is not quite that memorial. It is injured, above all, by the absence of the most important voices in McCarthy's life. Ms. Kiernan writes that she began the book in the early 90's, and by that time the key witnesses were dead: Harold Johnsrud, whom McCarthy married at 21 and divorced at 23; Philip Rahv, her lover; Edmund Wilson, whom she married and suffered with to her friends' bewilderment; Hannah Arendt, her unlikely best friend; and, of course, almost everyone who knew her as a child. Others, who are still living–most notably Reuel Wilson, her son, and Bowden Broadwater, her third husband–barely participated.

Ms. Kiernan fills these gaps with dozens of more tangential observers, and with her own narrative, neither of which quite compensates. Isaiah Berlin, Saul Bellow and Alfred Kazin, none of them intimates of McCarthy, provide some of the most astute observations, especially of the scandal surrounding Eichmann in Jerusalem , which McCarthy defended out of loyalty to Arendt and, one suspects, out of a sense of where the action was. From time to time, one catches the tone of the Partisan Review crowd of which McCarthy was a founding member, the merciless, intimate, ingenious arguments. (McCarthy was especially close to the Italian intellectual Nicola Chiaromonte, of whom William Phillips recalls, "People thought he was a genius because he was silent. Because he didn't talk much. He felt a lot.")

Inevitably, most of the people who are still around to be interviewed are much younger than McCarthy, and knew her in her more placid last decades; they are not peers but students, admirers, secretaries, even a maid. As a result, the second half of the book feels much too long, with details of McCarthy's houses and travels and finances and health squeezing out matters literary and genuinely personal. There are suggestions, for instance, that her relationship with her son was strained (he failed to attend her funeral), but the cause of the breach is not made clear.

Given the shortage of "raw material," the other possible approach for Ms. Kiernan would have been a close psychological analysis, an attempt to find out what made McCarthy so attractive and difficult. The theme that runs through her life and work is total certainty; she looked on tempests domestic and political and was never shaken. This made her formidable in conversation, where she delighted in holding people's characters up for evaluation, and extremely seductive to the people–usually men–on whom she focused her attention. It was also her major flaw as a writer, of both fiction and nonfiction. In The Group , for instance, one always feels sorry for McCarthy's characters, summoned out of the ether to be ridiculed and condescended to by their superior author.

In her two books of Vietnam reportage, the same certainty, transposed to the political realm, makes her come off as shamefully, irresponsibly naïve: She is led around by the nose by the North Vietnamese, whom she trusts implicitly, while she mocks an American prisoner of war. Ms. Kiernan's account of her meeting with that P.O.W., and its aftermath–after his release, he wrote about how McCarthy had "knocked on wood" during their meeting, leading him to be interrogated for hours about the code she must be using–is a locus classicus of the irresponsibility of the intellectual.

The fruitful question is what experiences and drives led McCarthy to place such value on being always and in advance correct, and superior to everyone around her. Ms. Kiernan goes some way toward an answer in her sketch of McCarthy's childhood, which is like something out of a fairy tale, minus the happy ending: After an idyllic early childhood with her charming, young parents, she was orphaned by the flu epidemic of 1918 and sent to live with old, humorless, abusive relatives. (When McCarthy came home one day with a school prize, her uncle beat her with a razor strop–"to teach me a lesson, he said, lest I become stuck-up"). The shock of that change would have been enough to make her realize that she had to be always self-sufficient, always able to master the people and circumstances around her. Her strangely cold obsession with sex–as Susan Sontag observes, her attitude seems to be that "when [men] do it with you, you have something on them"–is another form of this wary mastery. One does not have to be a Freudian (and McCarthy had no use for Freud) to guess at some sort of early sexual trauma. In The Group , the character whose life most resembles McCarthy's ends as a suicide; the most idealized character, the dream-Mary, turns out to be a lesbian.

An intrepid biographer could make much of this. But Ms. Kiernan, ensnared by her method, is confined to recounting events and bridging quotes. The result is that much of McCarthy's brilliance, charm and force are leached out. Ms. Kiernan's book gives us Mary plainer than she was.

In the late 1940's, W.H. Auden became enamored of the idea that every writer's mind is a household containing three personalities. T.S. Eliot's, he wrote, included an archdeacon, an old peasant grandmother and a young boy who liked to play practical jokes. His own, as described in his poem "A Household," was a paterfamilias tormented by his "miserable runt" of a son and his "slatternly hag" of a mother.

In fact, Auden's poetry has dozens of inhabitants, as various as the members of his actual household at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn (which included, among others, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee). Auden is the author of love lyrics ("Lay your sleeping head, my love") and ominous prophecies ("It is time for the destruction of error"); socialist lectures ("Today the struggle") and Christian hymns ("Let us praise our Maker, with true passion extol Him"); crystalline songs ("Deftly, admiral, cast your fly") and fantastically complex allegories (such as The Age of Anxiety , in which the four Jungian personality types converse in the meter of Beowulf ).

But the most important of the many fractures in Auden's life and work is that between Early and Later. The poet broke his life in two, quite intentionally, in 1939, when he abandoned England for New York City on the eve of war. Before the year was out, two more events would complete the break: his return to Christianity, after a decade's obsession with Freud and Marx; and his "Vision of Eros" in the form of Chester Kallman, an 18-year-old Jewish boy from Brooklyn.

Auden lived in New York for the next 30 years, and the details of his life here are almost folkloric. He was as successful, and nearly as famous, in America as he ever was in England; but a large part of the legend focuses on the unhappier aspects of his later years. Auden had always been slovenly in his personal habits, but by the 50's, when he was living at 77 St. Mark's Place, his situation was really appalling; Hannah Arendt remembered times "when his slum apartment was so cold that the water no longer functioned and he had to use the toilet in the liquor store at the corner, when his suit was … worn so thin that his trousers would suddenly split from top to bottom." Alcohol and tobacco and Benzedrine began to take their toll on his appearance, until his deeply wrinkled face–in his own words–looked "like a wedding cake left out in the rain." When he tried to give Dorothy Day a check for $250 to avert the closing of her Catholic Worker shelter, she thought he was a bum handing over $2.50.

Auden's long relationship with Chester Kallman–it lasted from the day they met until the day Auden died in 1973–has also proved a rich source of gossip. The younger man was considered Auden's inferior in every way by most of his friends, and his biographers continue to be puzzled by the attachment. (Richard Davenport-Hines, whose 1995 biography, Auden , is psychologically very acute, can find nothing nicer to say about Kallman than that "it was impossible to be indifferent about" him.) And the pain that Kallman frequently caused Auden, with his infidelities and public scenes, leaks into Auden's writing–his essay on Shakespeare's sonnets is practically a roman à clef about their affair. Yet Kallman always represented for Auden the possibility of real love, from which he had felt excluded by his homosexuality and his precocity. Auden only wore a wedding ring for the first few months after meeting Kallman; but it remained a marriage, if a troubled one, to the end.

The stories of Auden's life in New York have been well told by several biographers, and will surely be told again. But they have almost no place in Edward Mendelson's new study, Later Auden , which completes the work he began in 1981 with Early Auden . Probably no one alive knows Auden's poetry and prose better than Mr. Mendelson, and it shows: His close readings are always meticulous and insightful, and he draws detailed connections between what Auden read and what he wrote. Later Auden is invaluable for a complete understanding of Auden, and it should be kept on the shelf right next to the Collected Poems .

Mr. Mendelson's two-volume division is entirely appropriate, for ever since 1939, the Early and Later Audens have almost seemed like two different poets, and have done battle in the minds of critics and readers. For some–including Philip Larkin, who wrote an essay in 1960 called "What's Become of Wystan?"–Auden's emigration was a disaster. In the 30's, on this view, Auden thrived on the atmosphere of impending crisis, writing taut, nervous poems that expressed the mood of a generation; by moving to America, he lost touch with his natural audience and became merely "literary." For the other camp–which includes Mr. Mendelson–Early Auden is still a genius, but Later Auden is an even bigger genius. His emigration allowed him to pare away inauthenticity and rhetoric from his verse, and in America he wrote his best poems, meditations on simple but timeless themes like the nature of happiness and the relation between art and justice.

It's appropriate that Mr. Mendelson should defend the Later Auden, since it was the Later Auden who in 1972 plucked him from the ranks of academia to be his literary executor. Mr. Mendelson, now a professor at Columbia University, is still best known for his work with Auden's literary remains. It was a difficult assignment, made even harder by the poet's tendency to revise or renounce poems he had written decades earlier, including some of his most famous. Mr. Mendelson has performed his role expertly, mediating between the poet's wishes and his readers'. The Collected Poems follows Auden's instructions, omitting, for example, "September 1, 1939" ("the most dishonest poem I have ever written"); but the Selected Poems and the invaluable volume The English Auden fill in the gaps.

In Later Auden , Mr. Mendelson's focus is on the intellectual content of Auden's poems; and while this approach is generally illuminating, it does have the defects of its virtues. Mr. Mendelson pays relatively little attention to prosody, of which Auden was the greatest 20th-century master, and ventures only a few esthetic judgments of his own. He tends to treat Auden as a thinker, or at least as a philosophical poet, and he regards the changes in Auden's thought as deliberate advances: "In almost every poem Auden wrote at this time, he remembered and corrected the content and tone of poems he had written earlier." The problem with this approach is that Auden's ideas were usually confused, and not seldom flimsy. Though educated at Oxford University, he had an autodidact's mind, full of eccentric theories and explanations; the books that influenced him most were by "polymath generalizers"–or, less charitably, cranks, most of them now forgotten–who "rushed breathlessly across vast tracts of history, tracing patterns unimagined by others."

As a child, Auden preferred machinery to people, and later on he reached irritably for mechanistic explanations–whether Freudian, Marxist or Christian-existentialist–to supply the basic human understanding that he often seemed to lack. (Until meeting Kallman, Mr. Mendelson writes, "the word 'person' was not … part of [Auden's] moral vocabulary"–rather a large gap for a 32-year-old.) His lifelong habit of analyzing human nature in terms of spurious categories–the Prolific and the Devourer, A and B, Self and I, Alice and Mabel, Eden and New Jerusalem–is another symptom of the same deficiency.

But again: Auden's household contains multitudes. If one doesn't like the philosopher and synthesizer that Mr. Mendelson depicts, there is always the songwriter, the prosodist, the narrator with an eye for novelistic detail. Auden, as he himself wrote of W.B. Yeats, has also become his admirers, and he can be admired in as many different ways as he has readers. As Later Auden proves, no one reads him better than Edward Mendelson.