ABSTRACT
Auden wrote to Mrs E.R. Dodds on 5 September 1938, ‘Are the enclosed trash, or not? I am much too close to them to know…. They are the first part of a sonnet sequence for the China book. Please let me have them back, with comments, as they are the only copies’ (quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, ‘W.H. Auden: A Biography’, London: Allen & Unwin, 1981, p. 240), and then again in the autumn, enclosing his Commentary for the volume: ’Please let me have your comments. I am very uncertain whether this kind of thing is possible without becoming a prosy pompous old bore’ (ibid., p. 242).
