W. H. Auden Books

All of Auden's books of poems from the 1930s, including previously unpublished poems, are augmented by selections from his essays, reviews, film scripts, and stage and radio plays of the same period

W. H. Auden's poetry is explored in this comprehensive first complete edition, featuring both published and previously unpublished works. Edited by Edward Mendelson, this volume spans Auden's early career from 1927 to 1939, showcasing his development as a poet. It includes juvenilia, unpublished poems, and song lyrics intended for Benjamin Britten. The text presents original versions alongside detailed annotations that highlight Auden's revisions and clarify obscure references, offering a deep insight into his artistic evolution.

The second volume of this complete edition showcases W. H. Auden's poetic evolution from 1940 until his passing in 1973. It features all his published works from this period, including collections like The Double Man and Epistle to a Godson, alongside previously unpublished poems and songs. Edited by Edward Mendelson, the volume offers original texts, revised versions, and annotations that clarify obscure references, providing a comprehensive view of Auden as a mature artist. It also includes an edited version of his incomplete work, Thank You, Fog.

This collection presents all the poems W.H. Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. Together, these works display the range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, and his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited

The exploration of Romanticism is examined through the theme of the sea, with a particular focus on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Auden employs a Christian existentialist perspective to analyze the tendency of Romantic writers to escape from responsibility and community. Drawing from diverse sources, including the Bible and Baudelaire, the work delves into the complexities of human nature and the philosophical implications of seeking freedom in isolation.

This collection of the poems of W.H. Auden includes three poems referred to by Auden as "posthumous poems", and others that he omitted from the "Collected Shorter Poems" of 1966, printed here in revised versions found among his papers.

In this volume, W. H. Auden assembled, edited, and arranged the best of his prose writing, including the famous lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The result is less a formal collection of essays than an extended and linked series of observations—on poetry, art, and the observation of life in general.The Dyer's Hand is a surprisingly personal, intimate view of the author's mind, whose central focus is poetry—Shakespearean poetry in particular—but whose province is the author's whole experience of the twentieth century.

The Shield of Achilles is a poem by W. H. Auden first published in 1952, and the title work of a collection of poems by Auden, published in 1955. It is Auden's response to the detailed description, or ekphrasis, of the shield borne by the hero Achilles in Homer's epic poem the Iliad.The poem is the title work of The Shield of Achilles, a collection of poems in three parts, published in 1955, containing Auden's poems written from around 1951 through 1954. It begins with the sequence "Bucolics", then miscellaneous poems under the heading "In Sunshine and In Shade", then the sequence Horae Canonicae.It won the U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1956.

Between 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face. Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken. This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.

Some of his most famous and often quoted (or misquoted) lines appear in their original form, including the text of two poems in particular - 'Spain 1937' and 'September 1,1939' - that he later altered or repudiated. This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series of ten titles celebrating Faber's publishing over the decades.