Selected Poems
by W.H. Auden
from Vintage
This significantly expanded edition of W. H. Auden’s Selected Poems adds twenty poems to the hundred in the original edition, broadening its focus to better reflect the enormous wealth of form, rhetoric, tone, and content in Auden’s work. Newly included are such favorites as “Funeral Blues” and other works that represent Auden’s lighter, comic side, giving a fuller picture of the range of his genius. Also new are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure to younger generations of readers and a revised introduction that draws on recent additions to knowledge about Auden.
As in the original edition, the new Selected Poems makes available the preferred original versions of some thirty poems that Auden revised later in life, making it the best source for enjoying the many facets of Auden’s art in one volume.
The Portable Romantic Poets: Romantic Poets: Blake to Poe (The Viking Portable Library)
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
Collected Poems (Modern Library)
by W.H. Auden
from Modern Library
To commemorate the centennial of W. H. Auden’s birth, the Modern Library offers this elegant edition of the collected poems of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.
This volume includes all the poems that Auden wished to preserve, in a text that includes his final revisions, with corrections based on the latest research. Auden divided his poems into sections that corresponded to what he referred to as chapters in his life, each one beginning with a change in his inner life or external circumstances: the moment in 1933 when he first knew “exactly what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself”; his move from Britain to America in 1939; his first summer in Italy in 1948; his move to a summerhouse in Austria in 1958; and his return to England in 1972.
Auden’s work has perhaps the widest range and the greatest depth of any English poet of the past three centuries. From the anxious warnings of his early verse through the expansive historical perspectives of his middle years to the celebrations and thanksgiving in his later work, Auden wrote in a voice that addressed readers personally rather than as part of a collective audience. His styles and forms extend from ballads and songs to haiku and limericks to sonnets, sestinas, prose poems, and dozens of other constructions of his own invention. His tone ranges from spirited comedy to memorable profundity–often within the same work. His poems manage to be secular and sacred, philosophical and erotic, personal and universal.
“All the poems I have written were written for love,” Auden once said. This book includes his famous early poems about transient love (“Lay your sleeping head, my love,” “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”) and his later poems about enduring love (“In Sickness and in Health,” “First Things First”). The book also includes Auden’s longer, more thematically varied poems, from the expressionist charade “Paid on Both Sides” to the formal couplets of “New Year Letter”; the darkly comic sequel to The Tempest, “The Sea and the Mirror”; and a baroque eclogue set in a wartime bar, “The Age of Anxiety.”
This new edition includes a critical appreciation of Auden by Edward Mendelson, the editor of the present volume and Auden’s literary executor.
“W. H. Auden had the greatest gifts of any of our poets in the twentieth century, the greatest lap full of seed.”
–James Fenton, The New York Review of Books
“At the beginning of the new century, [Auden] is an indispensable poet. Even people who don’t read poems often turn to poetry at moments when it matters, and Auden matters now.”
–Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
Markings
by Dag Hammarskjold
from Vintage
Universally known and admired as a peacemaker, Dag Hammarskjöld concealed a remarkable intense inner life which he recorded over several decades in this journal of poems and spiritual meditations, left to be published after his death. A dramatic account of spiritual struggle, Markings has inspired hundreds of thousands of readers since it was first published in 1964.
Markings is distinctive, as W.H. Auden remarks in his foreword, as a record of "the attempt by a professional man of action to unite in one life the via activa and the via contemplativa." It reflects its author's efforts to live his creed, his belief that all men are equally the children of God and that faith and love require of him a life of selfless service to others. For Hammarskjöld, "the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action." Markings is not only a fascinating glimpse of the mind of a great man, but also a moving spiritual classic that has left its mark on generations of readers.
W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume III, 1949-1955 (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden)
by W. H. Auden
from Princeton University Press
This volume contains all of W. H. Auden's prose works from 1949 through 1955, including many little-known essays that exemplify his range, wit, depth, and wisdom. The book includes the complete text of Auden's first separately published prose book, The Enchafèd Flood, or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea, followed by more than one hundred separate essays, reviews, introductions, and lectures, as well as a questionnaire (complete with his own answers) about the reader's fantasy version of Eden. Two reviews that Auden wrote for the New Yorker, but which the magazine never printed, appear here for the first time, and a series of aphorisms previously published only in a French translation are printed in English. Among the previously unpublished lectures is a long account of the composition of his poem "Prime," complete with his comments on early rejected drafts.
The variety of style and subject in this book is almost inexhaustible. Auden writes about the imaginary mirrors that everyone carries through life; French existentialism and New Yorker cartoons; Freud, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Camus; Keats, Cervantes, Melville, Colette, Byron, Virgil, Yeats, Tolkien, and Virginia Woolf; opera, ballet, cinema, prosody, and music; English and American poetry and society; and politics and religion.
The introduction by Edward Mendelson places the essays in biographical and historical context, and the extensive textual notes explain obscure contemporary references and provide an often-amusing history of Auden's work as an editor of anthologies and a series of books by younger poets.
Voice of the Poet: W.H. Auden (Voice of the Poet)
by W. H. Auden
from Random House Audio Voices
W.H. Auden describes the experience of poems read aloud:
The formal structure of a poem is not something distinct from its meaning but as intimately bound up with the latter as the body is with the soul. When one reads a poem in a book one grasps the form immediately, but when one listens to a recitation, it is sometimes very difficult to "hear" the structure.Thankfully, the throaty growlings unearthed on this rare audio collection are accompanied by text for each of the 23 selections. The handsome booklet also includes a substantial introduction by editor J.D. McClatchy. Highlights from Voice of the Poet--which is being released along with works by Sylvia Plath and James Merrill--include three sonnets from Auden's judicial "In Time of War," "The Wanderer," the elegy "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," and the ballad "As I Walked out One Evening." Listen to Auden read from "As I Walked out One Evening." Visit our audio help page for more information. Used with permission of the estate of W.H. Auden. All rights reserved. (Running time: 1 hour, 1 cassette)
Some of the most enduring poetry of the twentieth century, read by the legendary Auden himself. This collection features such favorites as "As I Walked Out One Evening," "Musee des Beaux Arts" and "The Shield of Achilles," among many others.
A companion book is included with these never-before-released recordings.
W.H. Auden: Selected Poems
by W. H. Auden
from Vintage
This edition presents the original versions of many poems, which Auden revised to conform to his evolving political and literary attitudes later in his career. In this volume, Edward Mendelson has restored the early versions of some thirty poems generally considered to be superior to the later versions, allowing the reader to see the entire range of Auden's work. Selected and edited by Edward Mendelson
Auden: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)
by W. H. Auden
from Everyman's Library
"You can never step in the same Auden twice," wrote the critic Randall Jarrell, alluding both to the etymology of Auden's name--which comes from river--and the rapid transformations of his poetic style. Wystan Hugh Auden began as a cryptic voice of the Thirties, with alluring yet mysterious creations like "The Secret Agent." Next he made himself into the very model of an engagé artist with "Refugee Blues" or "Spain"--explicitly political utterances that the poet later renounced. Finally, Auden shocked his public by moving from England to the United States, where he fulfilled his ambition to become a "minor Atlantic Goethe" (although many would insist on calling him a major one). Early or late, however, the music of Auden's verse is instantly recognizable, and fantastically memorable. Readers need only hear "In Praise of Limestone" or "The Fall of Rome" or "O Tell Me the Truth About Love" a single time to have selected lines imprinted on their brains. Nor did Auden ever lose his touch as one of the sublime love poets of our age, which was evident from the moment he published his celebrated "Lullaby": "Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm; / Time and fevers burn away / Individual beauty from / Thoughtful children, and the grave / Proves the child ephemeral: / But in my arms till break of day / Let the living creature lie / Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful." So what if his face got all wrinkled?
The Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Auden is just another reminder of his exhilarating lyric power and his understanding of love and longing in all their sacred and profane guises. One of English poetry's great 20th century masters, Poems: Auden is the short collection of an exemplary champion of human wisdom in its encounter with the mysteries of experience.
The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (W.H. Auden: Critical Editions)
by W. H. Auden
from Princeton University Press
Written in the midst of World War II after its author emigrated to America, "The Sea and the Mirror" is not merely a great poem but ranks as one of the most profound interpretations of Shakespeare's final play in the twentieth century. As W. H. Auden told friends, it is "really about the Christian conception of art" and it is "my Ars Poetica, in the same way I believe The Tempest to be Shakespeare's." This is the first critical edition. Arthur Kirsch's introduction and notes make the poem newly accessible to readers of Auden, readers of Shakespeare, and all those interested in the relation of life and literature--those two classic themes alluded to in its title.
The poem begins in a theater after a performance of The Tempest has ended. It includes a moving speech in verse by Prospero bidding farewell to Ariel, a section in which the supporting characters speak in a dazzling variety of verse forms about their experiences on the island, and an extravagantly inventive section in prose that sees the uncivilized Caliban address the audience on art--an unalloyed example of what Auden's friend Oliver Sachs has called his "wild, extraordinary and demonic imagination."
Besides annotating Auden's allusions and sources (in notes after the text), Kirsch provides extensive quotations from his manuscript drafts, permitting the reader to follow the poem's genesis in Auden's imagination. This book, which incorporates for the first time previously ignored corrections that Auden made on the galleys of the first edition, also provides an unusual opportunity to see the effect of one literary genius upon another.
The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose: Volume II. 1939-1948 (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden)
by W. H. Auden
from Princeton University Press
W. H. Auden's first ten years in the United States were marked by rapid and extensive change in his life and thought. He became an American citizen, fell in love with Chester Kallman, and began to reflect on American culture and to explore the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr and other Protestant theologians. This volume contains every piece of prose that Auden wrote during these years, including essays and reviews he published under pseudonyms. Most have never been reprinted in any form since their initial publication in such magazines and newspapers as the Nation, the New Republic, Common Sense, Vogue, and the New York Times.
Auden's prose during this period is frequently directly autobiographical even as he comments on literature, psychology, politics, and religion. The writings range from a dialogue about W. B. Yeats through a respectful parody of Gertrude Stein to Jamesian essays on Henry James. They also include lively and often profound responses to ancient and modern history as well as to contemporary issues in politics and religion. Other highlights include writings on opera and poetry as well as reports of Auden's lectures and the text of an unfinished autobiographical book, The Prolific and the Devourer. Throughout, Edward Mendelson's extensive and illuminating editor's notes explain all contemporary and private allusions.
By making available a large cache of important but previously difficult-to-obtain writings on key subjects, this volume will be of obvious appeal to Auden's legions of admirers. It will also be enjoyed by everyone interested in twentieth-century literature, religion, and culture.
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