Anthony Hartley on Auden's Total Cosmos, ‘Spectator'

Hartley (b. 1925) has worked for the ‘Guardian’, ‘The Economist’, the ‘Spectator’ (as Diplomatic Correspondent and as Deputy Editor), and ‘Encounter’ (as Assistant Editor); edited ‘Interplay Magazine’, New York, 1967–71, and since 1971 has been Executive Director of the Committee of Nine of the North Atlantic Assembly. His publications include ‘A Study of England’ (1963) and ‘Gaullism: The Rise and Fall of a Political Movement’ (1971); he edited the Penguin books of nineteenth and twentieth century French verse, and the Penguin ‘Mallarmé’. The largest part of Empson and Auden, the review from which this extract is taken, discusses Empson’s ‘Collected Poems’.