The Complete Works Of Wh Auden Prose 1956 1962

Auden speaks of the poet and his craft as well as literary figures and their works and observations on life in general.

This fourth volume of W.H. Auden's prose provides a unique picture of this legendary writer's mind and art when he was at the height of his powers, from 1956 through 1962, including the years when he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. The volume includes his best-known and most important prose collection, "The Dyer's Hand", as well as scores of essays, reviews, and lectures on subjects ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien and Martin Luther to psychedelic drugs, cooking, and Homer. Much of the material has never been collected in book form, and some selections, such as the witty orations Auden wrote for ceremonies at Oxford University, are almost entirely unknown. Edward Mendelson's introduction and comprehensive notes provide biographical and historical explanations of all obscure references. The text includes extensive corrections and revisions that Auden marked in personal copies of his work and which are printed here for the first time. -- front flap.

From one of the great modern writers, the acclaimed lectures in which he draws on a lifetime of experience to take the measure of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "W. H. Auden, poet and critic, will conduct a course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research beginning Wednesday. Mr. Auden . . . proposes to read all Shakespeare's plays in chronological order." So the New York Times reported on September 27, 1946, giving notice of a rare opportunity to hear one of the century's great poets discuss at length one of the greatest writers of all time. Reconstructed by Arthur Kirsch, these lectures offer remarkable insights into Shakespeare's plays and sonnets while also adding immeasurably to our understanding of Auden.

This fourth volume of W.H. Auden's prose provides a unique picture of this legendary writer's mind and art when he was at the height of his powers, from 1956 through 1962, including the years when he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. The volume includes his best-known and most important prose collection, "The Dyer's Hand", as well as scores of essays, reviews, and lectures on subjects ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien and Martin Luther to psychedelic drugs, cooking, and Homer. Much of the material has never been collected in book form, and some selections, such as the witty orations Auden wrote for ceremonies at Oxford University, are almost entirely unknown. Edward Mendelson's introduction and comprehensive notes provide biographical and historical explanations of all obscure references. The text includes extensive corrections and revisions that Auden marked in personal copies of his work and which are printed here for the first time. -- front flap.

A definitive collection of works by the preeminent American poet.

This is the first book-length study foregrounding Auden’s sense of place as a means for enhancing our grasp of this crucial twentieth-century poet. Proposing that Auden had a remarkable spatial sensibility, this book concentrates on his treatment of his homeland England, as well as the North Pennines and Iceland, both of which served as his ‘good’ places, ‘holy’ grounds and sources of topophilic sentiment. The readings draw on the scholarship of humanistic geography, tracing patterns of mental constructs which emerge from spatial experience. In a scholarly but engaging way, this book argues that focusing on Auden’s poetics of place as it emerged and evolved can be instrumental to our understanding of this influential poet not only in relation to his epoch but also to the Anglophone poetic tradition. Precisely because of his stature, these elaborations on Auden’s preoccupation with places, escapism, borders and local identity promise to enrich our understanding of the cultural and intellectual climate of the interwar period, when established notions of local places and cultures were beginning to be contested by internationalisation. This study will be of interest to both academics and students in the field of Anglophone literary studies while also appealing to those attracted to Auden’s poetry, interwar culture and the literary representation of space.

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 second of two volumes of the eagerly anticipated first complete edition of Auden’s poems—including some that have never been published before W. H. Auden (1907–1973) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his reputation has only grown since his death. Published on the hundredth anniversary of the year in which he began to write poetry, this is the second volume of the first complete edition of Auden’s poems. Edited, introduced, and annotated by renowned Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, this definitive edition includes all the poems Auden wrote for publication, in their original texts, and all his later revised versions, as well as poems and songs he never published, some of them printed here for the first time. This volume follows Auden as a mature artist, containing all the poems that he published or submitted for publication from 1940 until his death in 1973, at age sixty-six. This includes all his poetry collections from this period, from The Double Man (1941) through Epistle to a Godson (1972). The volume also features an edited version of his incomplete, posthumous book Thank You, Fog, as well as his self-designated “posthumous” poems. The main text presents the poems in their original published versions. The notes include the extensive revisions that he made to his poems over the course of his career, and provide explanations of obscure references. The first volume of this edition, Poems, Volume I: 1927–1939, is also available.