This book is worth owning for the introduction by Auden, let alone his selections from Kierkegaard, though they are a bit quirky, inescapably so given the voluminous works of K.Auden claims he had "the intellectual conceit knocked out of him" by Kierkegaard, and at approximately the same time he read him for the first time he became a member of the Episcopal Church.His explanation of Kierkegaard's basic conceptions is lucid enough, but Auden's love for juggling abstractions doesn't mesh entirely with "existentialism". If you read much of his prose, you begin to wonder why someone who wrote marvelous poetry filled with fresh but concrete imagery was so enamoured of the generalized and limiting word. "All men are divided into three parts ..." is a sentence that I doubt Auden ever wrote, but it would fit into at least half or more of his reviews and essays.However, this is a good selection with a very good introduction, and though it might prove puzzling to a beginner, it's an acceptable starting point for anyone interested in finding out about him.