by W.H. Auden
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Product Description
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
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Average Customer Review:
3 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
 No., 2006-06-25
This is a poet who has no emotional or spiritual depth. He is poet of shame. His sarcasm and wit is anything but remarkable. I was actually looking foward to reading his poetry in my class, but was terribly disappointed. It's not worth it.
5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
 My favorite poet, 2005-10-08
Since the first time I read Auden's "The Unknown Citizen" in the 10th grade, I have been captivated by his writing style and the pure emotion his poems express. The meaning isn't lost in needless words, but is clear and passionate. I could spend hours just reading his works and oftentimes do. Everyone should read a poem or two of his.
2 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
Auden's collected poems, 2005-09-29
The softcover book arrived in excellent condition and in a timely manner.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Auden of the anthologies , 2004-12-12
The work of Auden I know is not the complete Auden, but rather the Auden of the anthologies. It is the Auden of Musee de Beaux Arts and September 1,1939 and Elegy for W.B. Yeats. It is the Auden of memorable lines, ' The universal error bred in the bone , not to be loved/ but to be loved alone'. It is Auden who is a public poet speaking in lines held together not only by internal rhyme, but by a certain majestic authority of statement. It is the Auden whose poetry at its best seems to be saying something significant about the human condition at a particular time of our history.
This I know is not the whole Auden but it is rather that part given to the widest audience in anthology - the public Auden. Here I sense Auden's poetry spoke with a clarity and sense rare especially in his own time.
He does not have the music of Yeats and Wallace Stevens at their best. He is not as some readers on Amazon have suggested the greatest poet in English in the twentieth century. But my own sense he is one of the best.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
I;m Willing to go with Joseph Brodsky, 2003-03-23
I feel for people like Nate Dorwood who wrote the comment
about the first line in "musee des beaux arts" being "fatuous."
This may be Auden's greatest poem. Ian McEwan recently paid
tribute to it's greatness, and Russian poet Joseph Brodsky,
who admired this poem in particular, claimed that Auden had
"the greatest mind of the 20th Century." Neither of them,
both geniuses themselves, found anything about "Musee" to
be "fatuous."
Perhaps it's time to re-read?
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