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Product Description
Product Description
This edition includes all the poems that Auden wished to preserve, in a text that includes his final revisions, with corrections based on the latest research. In a new preface, Edward Mendelson offers a critical appreciation of Auden, as well as explanation of the history of the text and the editorial principles that he has followed. The "Collected Poems" covers the full range of Auden's extraordinary output, divided into sections that corresponded to what Auden referred to as chapters in his life: the moment in 1933 when he first knew 'exactly what it means to love one's neighbour 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.
About the Author
W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907, and brought up in Birmingham. He went to Christ Church College, Oxford, where Stephen Spender privately printed a booklet of his poems. After university he lived for a time in Berlin, before returning to England to teach. His first book, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber in 1930. Other volumes of poems and plays followed during the 1930s. He went to Spain during the civil war, to Iceland (with Louis MacNeice) and later travelled to China. In 1939 he and Christopher Isherwood left for America, where Auden spent the next fifteen years lecturing, reviewing, writing poetry and opera librettos, and editing anthologies. He became an American citizen in 1946, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. In 1956 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and a year later went to live in Kirchstetten in Austria, after spending several summers on Ischia. He died in Vienna in 1973.
Edward Mendelson is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His books include Early Auden, Later Auden, and The Things That Matter.
Edward Mendelson is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His books include Early Auden, Later Auden, and The Things That Matter.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
For half a century I have skirted round Auden, apart from some short and well-known lyrics; I feared the longer ones were a bit dry and demanding. Then I agreed to teach him to adults. I bought a 300pp ''Selected'', and then a ''Collected'' up to the mid-50's but kept falling between stools as we all uncovered poems we liked individually but which were never to be found across all collections.
This 900pp. US edition is a huge boon tho' it takes 2 weeks to arrive.It reveals the whole arc of his writing life, his precocious early intelligence, his polymathic interests, how adventurous his emotional and sexual experiences were.... What emerges is a profoundly benign approach to human life, an experience that can be improved but never perfected, and that improvement is effected by facing and integrating our demons and uncertainties.. His poetic obituary to Yeats in 1939 ends:
'' In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.''
Towards the end of his life he wrote 'Thanksgiving for a habitat', celebrating his house in Austria. Twelve poems each evoking a room and a particular friend who'd stayed there with them. It's a humane, erudite sequence that leaves one with a delighted smile on one's face.
Even here it is not a complete Auden. There are some pieces the editor has not 'selected in' and some are not in because Auden disowned them. This includes the magnificent reflections on the coming war - 'September 1st, 1939'. A final observation - Auden was a fine reader of his own work, not over-emphatic as an actor might be, nor dead-pan as some poets seem to be as if to be animated might reactivate the stresses from which the poems originally emerged. It's worth hunting down some CDs. I found two - "The Spoken Word" - WHA - British Library/BBC.
John Rivers
This 900pp. US edition is a huge boon tho' it takes 2 weeks to arrive.It reveals the whole arc of his writing life, his precocious early intelligence, his polymathic interests, how adventurous his emotional and sexual experiences were.... What emerges is a profoundly benign approach to human life, an experience that can be improved but never perfected, and that improvement is effected by facing and integrating our demons and uncertainties.. His poetic obituary to Yeats in 1939 ends:
'' In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.''
Towards the end of his life he wrote 'Thanksgiving for a habitat', celebrating his house in Austria. Twelve poems each evoking a room and a particular friend who'd stayed there with them. It's a humane, erudite sequence that leaves one with a delighted smile on one's face.
Even here it is not a complete Auden. There are some pieces the editor has not 'selected in' and some are not in because Auden disowned them. This includes the magnificent reflections on the coming war - 'September 1st, 1939'. A final observation - Auden was a fine reader of his own work, not over-emphatic as an actor might be, nor dead-pan as some poets seem to be as if to be animated might reactivate the stresses from which the poems originally emerged. It's worth hunting down some CDs. I found two - "The Spoken Word" - WHA - British Library/BBC.
John Rivers
18 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Auden's poetry is one that you can understand. Down-to-earth,it
easily find it's way into my heart.
Most of us already knew "Funeral Blues", but there are atoher gems also.
easily find it's way into my heart.
Most of us already knew "Funeral Blues", but there are atoher gems also.
Enjoy!
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I would love to put the book in my bag and carry it with me everyday.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
cheap
everything alright, it was a bit painted inside, which I think they didn't say in the description, but it's a 900p book for only 2 cents.
Published 6 months ago by kak
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I did not recieve this book but a note that it had been returned and I was refunded. I did not return the book and I am now waiting for a replacement. Does it take long?
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Published 22 months ago by Urban
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