Auden's reserved book list for classes on Shakespeare (1944) How many ways can we read William Shakespeare? Reading together on holidays the lectures of John Berryman and W.H. Auden on Shakespeare resurrects the world of seventy years ago, its irresistible confidence, its newfound hope. Both poets are finding their feet within a transatlantic milieu in which the whole terrestrial globe is now mapped. Auden believed that an English-language poet’s views on Shakespeare were essential to our understanding of themselves as poets, a sign of the nature of their vocation. Berryman agrees implicitly with this view and it drives the force of their interpretation, and their own poetic character. Although we know much already from their writings about their takes on Shakespeare, both books of lectures are posthumous, published over a quarter of a century after their deaths in the early seventies. So we encounter several pasts at once, that of their own lives now ended, that of...