W. H. Auden sailed for New York on January 19, 1939. He would remain in America off and on until of the last his year of his life, becoming an American citizen in 1946. Auden was roundly criticized for leaving England when he did; after all, the1930s had been dubbed “The Age of Auden,” and even admirers of his poetry saw his departure as an unpardonable — and cowardly — defection in time of war. The criticism still simmers. Last year, during the centenary celebrations of his birth, the charges against Auden were occasionally resurrected in articles and letters to the press, often with lingering bitterness. In hindsight, it seems clear that Auden’s motives were far more complicated — and personal — than his critics assumed. Still, the blithe lightheartedness of his departure at such a moment suggested at best a surprising callousness in so socially conscious a poet.

America seems to have been irresistible to the young Auden. It not only offered a fresh start, but afforded him the chance to grow in new ways. In a sense, he was sailing away from the predictably public figure he had become toward some undiscovered destination within himself. America encouraged the introvert in him, he wrote, adding — amazingly enough — that “all Americans are introverts.” The Auden who arrived on these shores was in certain respects as clueless as Columbus.

To support himself, he turned increasingly to prose. Essays, reviews, prefaces, lectures, even program notes and record sleeve comments, not only paid the bills but made poetry possible. Now, with the fifth volume of his “Complete Works” and the third of his prose out — with a fourth, and final, volume promised — we can glimpse almost the full range of his interests and his remarkable versatility. In “Prose, Volume III: 1949–1955” (Princeton University Press, 816 pages, $49.50), edited by Edward Mendelson, his literary executor, Auden discusses a host of varied writers, from Dostoevsky and Camus, Yeats and Eliot, to Graham Greene and J.R.R. Tolkien, among many others. The volume also contains his long, and rather bizarre, study “The Enchafèd Flood or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea” of 1949 — the title is taken from “Othello” — as well as his wonderful book-length introductions to the five-volume “Poets of the English Language,” still the best anthology of its kind, which he co-edited with Norman Holmes Pearson. But Auden also writes on less expected topics: ballet and opera (he co-authored the libretto of “The Rake’s Progress” with his lover Chester Kallman), and even cartoons.

Auden’s prose is often uneven; he wrote to strict deadlines, which he met with great punctilio, but at times the haste shows. Worse, when he waxed philosophical, he became dismayingly banal, and his prose positively congeals. His “Nature, History and Poetry,” reproduced here in two equally numbing versions, was originally written to honor the French poet Saint-John Perse, but since Auden neglected to mention his name, the piece, mercifully, never appeared. Auden’s passing infatuation during these years with the humorless Danish philosopher Kierkegaard and his “existentialism” also had the effect of clouding his prose.

By contrast, when Auden felt affinity with a subject, his prose could dazzle. His essay here on Oscar Wilde, “A Playboy of the Western World: St. Oscar, the Hominterm Martyr,” is at once poignant and astute, as is his fine introduction to a selection of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. But the best essay may be “Portrait of a Whig,” Auden’s searching and affectionate study of the inimitable Sydney Smith (1771–1845), “wit and pamphleteer,” as well as Anglican priest (who once defined heaven as “eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets”). Smith’s integrity and outspoken hatred of injustice, as well as his contempt for pomposity, endeared him to Auden — in many ways something of an 18th-century man himself.

For Auden, as Mr. Mendelson makes clear in his superb introduction, the writing of prose nourished his poetry; he chose subjects for reviews or lectures that touched on the themes of poems he was then struggling through. Auden once said that “the winter months are those in which I earn enough dollars to allow me to live here in the summer and devote myself to the unprofitable occupation of writing poetry.” “Here” was Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples, to which, he wrote, in a 1948 poem, “a fair wind has / brought me rejoicing with dear friends / from soiled productive cities.” Auden may have written his prose largely for dollars in such “soiled productive cities” as New York, but the labor of prose changed him, and his poetry, for the better. The later poems are more genial, more nuanced; his prose reflections led him to accord poetry a civic role: It now offered a shared grace. The dazzling firebrand of the ’30s had mellowed splendidly — and convincingly — into a latter-day Horace.

Even those leaden meditations on “nature and history” were impishly transformed in his verse. In “Archaeology,” the last poem Auden wrote, in August 1973, a month before his death, he stated:

From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all

our school text-books lie.
What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of,

being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.

eormsby@nysun.com