"It is wonderful to have this new edition of "The Sea and the Mirror," which I have always considered Auden's greatest work written in America and certainly one of the summits of his career. The long speech of Caliban, channeling Henry James, is in itself a marvelment."--John Ashbery
"The most significant of all Auden's unpatriotic Shakespearean forays of the 1940s, "The Sea and the Mirror" is a work of enormous skill, learning, and intelligence, a stylistic tour de force that is also freakish, polemical, confessional, and open-ended. It is a poem that comes much nearer to being a major salvo in Auden's cultural war with Little Englandism than it does to being the modest academic 'commentary' that on the title page it rather deviously declares itself to be. Arthur Kirsch's edition of this work is a fine addition to the canon of Auden scholarship. This book will fascinate all readers of Auden, and of Shakespeare."--Nicholas Jenkins
