“W.H. Auden at Work: The Craft of Revision, by Alexis Levitin, is an elegant, intriguing tour de force of Auden’s deft and brilliant hand at revision. Equally intriguing is the story of how this book came to be – the unlikely collaboration of its authors and their shared deep, even obsessive, abiding love for Auden and his work. Levitin and Kulseth “make it new” all over again and drive home with precise, thoroughly forensic detail the utter relevance of Auden and the enduring lessons on craft that he dispensed. Kulseth unabashedly details in his introduction ‘a record of [his] wonder at these poems, in the hopes that [we] too might wonder …’ Indeed ‘wonder’ is the operative word, and of profound magnitude, in light of this extraordinary, painstakingly researched and wholly necessary volume.”