WHAuden never really solved the question of how and where to live. From the 1940s, his professional base was in New York, and he made money part of the year by teaching, giving readings and writing for magazines. The summers were spent in Ischia. Although he was well respected and widely acknowledged as, after TSEliot, one of the leading poets of his day, he was not a Top-Earning Author, and he was not entirely, in all companies, respectable.

He was respected enough to be asked by Stravinsky (on the recommendation of Aldous Huxley) to write The Rake's Progress libretto, which Auden and his lover Chester Kallman completed in 1948. But, when the score was delivered to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, it was turned down. The scene in which Tom Rakewell marries the bearded lady (an invention of the librettists, not found in Hogarth) was considered too shocking, which was why the premiere was eventually held in Venice in 1951.

In some ways, this business of being respected but not respectable suited Auden rather well. He had always loved to shock and, while he did not make a militant issue of his queerness (in the way that Christopher Isherwood would), he made little secret of the way matters stood. You can hear this in a review of a book by the anarchist George Woodcock about Oscar Wilde.

Woodcock regrets the sordid aspect of Wilde's love life. Auden won't have any of this. “Surely the really nice thing about Wilde,” he says, “is that his life was so much more honest than his writings; after all the high-falutin talk about Beauty and the New Hedonism, it is such a relief to discover that Wilde was just an ordinary sinner like you and me who liked his greens and wasn't too particular about the restaurant. He was a phoney prophet but a serious playboy”.

This roping in of the readers (in this case, the readers of the Partisan Review) this blithe assertion that their sex lives were just like Wilde's, this absolute refusal to give credit to Woodcock's rather strait-laced version of anarchism - this is all typical of Auden in a provocative mood. One cannot help thinking that the expression “he liked his greens” came from camp slang of the period, and so had a private meaning for those who were in the club.

But what was okay for the Partisan Review might be looked at askance in The New York Times (where Auden is rumoured to have been turned down for a regular books column on grounds of sexual degeneracy), or The New Yorker. Auden wrote brilliantly for both, and one can only wonder what the objection can have been to his review of Byron's letters, written for The New Yorker in 1950 but not used.

Perhaps the chattiness of the style seemed self-indulgent. Perhaps it seemed camp, a term Auden actually uses in the course of the review, although in an unusual form. He liked pioneering current slang in print (long before it became routine for writers to switch between the language of High Seriousness and smart argot), and lexicographers may be interested in a couple of early uses of the term “trade”, to mean (strictly) heterosexual men selling sexual favours (to men or women).

Several of the essays here are written for The Griffin, the newsletter of a book club called the Readers' Subscription. There has probably never been a better book club, and I'm sure there has never been a better book-club newsletter. It was run by Auden, Lionel Trilling, the leading critic of the day, and Jacques Barzun, the historian of ideas (born 1907 and still with us). The essays these three wise men sent out with the books they had selected still read well, adding up to an attractive picture of intellectual life in the period: an anthology of them was published in 2001 under the title A Company of Readers.

The nonchalant style, the quality of sprezzatura that Auden admired in Byron's prose, takes training, as Auden said, as well as a natural gift. I don't say that everything in these almost 800 pages will be equally welcome to all tastes. Some of it may seem obscure and hard, although Auden liked to speak and write plainly and definitely in addressing the general reader. He tells us that “Works of art are closer to each other than they are to their creators; a poet's library will enlighten us about his poems infinitely more than his childhood or his love affairs.” And he lists his own nursery library, which, along with Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, featured Machinery for Metalliferous Mines and Lead and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor.

He goes on: “When, at the age of 15, I began to be consciously interested in poetry, my taste was formed by reading Walter de la Mare's anthology Come Hither, which still seems to me the best possible introduction to poetry. (I have never held in my hands a book with a more exquisite smell.)” One recalls that, in a round-up for Publishers' Weekly several pages earlier, Auden recommended a volume by SJPerelman on the grounds of “a virtue which I believe to be unduly neglected by publishers: it has the nicest smell”.

What is unmistakable is the appetite and application he brings to such diverse tasks as: an article for the 15th-anniversary issue of Mademoiselle; a sleeve-note for the operas Cav & Pag; a radio talk on Hardy's poetry. The Auden fan will, by definition, be enchanted throughout. And rightly so. I recommend following various themes: what Auden says about Pound in the years of his disgrace; about TS Eliot, his British editor; and about Freud, whose biography by Ernest Jones came out during these years.

This is the fifth volume in the complete edition of Auden's works (the third to be devoted to his prose), and one is moved to say how lucky he was in his choice of literary executor, Edward Mendelson, the editor of the series. So many things in Auden's life, and in his death, were chaotic. But the handling of his literary estate has been exemplary and if, as Auden said, “the first and most fundamental duty of the poet is...to praise what is excellent,” what greater pleasure than this duty can there be? So much effort has been saved - from the back number, from the archive and from the editor's spike. Auden would have been astonished. The rest of us can say: Bravo.

The Complete Works of WH Auden edited by Edward Mendelson
Faber £40 pp816 Buy the book £36.00 plus free delivery

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