W.H. Auden: Collected Poems

Auden, W.H., Edited & Introduced by Edward Mendelson

ISBN 10: 0394408950 / ISBN 13: 9780394408958

Published by Random House, New York, 1976

About this Item

ASTONISHING: PROFOUND: INVENTIVE: INFUSED WITH LOVE: AS-NEW First Edition hardcover (Orig. 1976 ) w/ no. line at "2" indicating First Printing: FINE unclipped mylar-protected jacket w/ sharp AS-NEW edges & corners & showing orig. $17.50 pub. price at inside-front top-right corner BUT w/ slight fading (orange to tan) of spine-panel borders, AS-NEW golden-bronze silk-finish linen-over-boards cover w/ sharp AS-NEW edges & corners & w/ initials WHA gold-stamped at center-top of front panel & w/ titles in bright gold-stamp on spine, IMMACULATE smooth-cut text block exterior, AS-NEW unmarked cream-white card-stock end-papers, AS-NEW perfect binding w/ tight sheets & uncreased spine, PRISTINE interior handsomely printed on EXCELLENT unblemished archival paper * 6.24" x 9.42" x 2.04", 1.18 kg, 696 pp * ABOUT THE BOOK: Between 1927 & his death in 1973, W.H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language w/ a new face. Or rather, w/ 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 w/ all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice & the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, & his ability to recast those traditions in modern times. 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; & his return to England in 1972. Auden's work has perhaps the widest range & the greatest depth of any English poet of the past 300 years. From the anxious warnings of his early verse through the expansive historical perspectives of his middle years to the celebrations & thanksgiving in his later work, Auden wrote in a voice that addressed readers personally rather than as part of a collective audience. His styles & forms extend from ballads & songs to haiku & limericks to sonnets, sestinas, prose poems, & 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 & sacred, philosophical & erotic, personal & 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") & 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"; & a baroque eclogue set in a wartime bar, "The Age of Anxiety". This edition includes an introduction by Edward Mendelson, the editor of the present volume and Auden's literary executor. HIGHEST PRAISE: "W.H. Auden had the greatest gifts of any of our poets in the 20th century." -James Fenton, NYRB. "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, & Auden matters now". -Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker * SHIPPING: MNEMOSYNE carefully wraps, labels & custom-packages this fine book for FREE domestic shipment via USPS MEDIA MAIL or USPS PRIORITY MAIL for a nominal additional fee & via efficient USPS FIRST CLASS MAIL to all international shipments at our posted rates.

Seller Inventory # 011533

Bibliographic Details

• Title: W.H. Auden: Collected Poems
• Publisher: Random House, New York
• Publication Date: 1976
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394408950
• ISBN 13: 9780394408958
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Weight: 1.18 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

Collects all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the versions he approved as final, providing the full range of the great poet's work between 1930 and 1974

About the Author

W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907, and W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907, and brought up in Birmingham. His first book, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber in 1930. 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.