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This is the first volume in a new series on the work of poet W.H. Auden. It includes a large amount of unpublished material by Auden, notably six poems written in German in the early 1930s, translated by the poet and David Constantine, and the complete version of his important early essay, "Writing," with a new foreword by its original editor, Naomi Mitchinson. Substantial selections from Auden's letters to Stephen Spender, E.R. Dodds, and Mrs. Dodds are presented with full annotation. Including essays about Auden, his mentors, and contemporaries by leading scholars in the field, and advice on collecting Auden's works, Auden Studies is indispensable for students, bibliophiles, and general readers interested in the great poet and his fellow writers. ... Read more

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Two Literary Greats in China, 1938
This is the record of a train journey from Hong Kong to Shanghai, made by Isherwood and Auden between February and June, 1938. The writers had been commissioned by their publisher to write a travel book about the East, the choice of itinerary left to their own discretion. With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the pair decided to go to China. As Isherwood says in the foreword: "We spoke no Chinese, and possessed no special knowledge of Far Eastern affairs." Acknowledging that he cannot vouch for the accuracy of many of the things told him by the Chinese, Isherwood continues: "We can only record, for the benefit of the reader who has never been to China, some impression of what he would be likely to see, and of what kind of stories he would be likely to hear."

In this collaborative effort, Isherwood wrote the text and Auden contributed a substantial body of verse. There is also a very good selection of photos, mostly of people, both notable (Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Chou En-lai) and obscure (soldiers, peasants).

Throughout their journey, Auden and Isherwood were treated as dignitaries, shown every deference by the locals and granted numerous audiences with both Chinese and European officials. They seem to always be sitting down to tea with somebody! Except for the occasional Japanese air raid, the travelers never get all that close to the war. The front is always somewhere out there on the periphery. I didn't find the book particulary illuminating about the nature of the Sino-Japanese War. There are a few mentions of the atrocities committed by the Japanese Army, but not much detail. That criticism notwithstanding, JOURNEY TO A WAR is a very interesting book for armchair travelers, and Auden and Isherwood are pleasant and amusing traveling companions. ... Read more

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Ancient beauty
W. H. Auden's co-translation with the scholar Paul B. Taylor of portionsof the Icelandic verse saga the "Edda" is dedicated to J. R. R.Tolkien, and with reason.Auden's first encounter with Icelandic was underTolkien's influence.This is wholly fitting, perhaps; Icelandic andGermanic myth is best known to a general reader through its influence onTolkien and Wagner.Certainly this book is a convincing argument that theNorse body of myth deserves more attention, as does its verse.

The verseof the Edda is highly alliterative and stanza-based, generally told in thefirst person or as dialogue.It reads much like "Beowulf" in anygood poetic translation, filled with pungent consonants and forthrightstatements.Auden's rendering anticipates Seamus Heany's acclaimed"Beowulf" in its readability and beauty in English, producingpassages like the following:

"Doughty Thor drew boldly The hideousserpent up on board, Struck with his hammer the high hair-mountain Of thewrithing Coiler, Kin of the Wolf." (p. 92)

Familiarity with Norsemythic cosmology helps in passages such as that, of course, and theIntroduction by Taylor and Peter Salus explains both the meter and theworld of the poems.It is somewhat more scholarly in bent than Heany'sintroduction to "Beowulf", but is nonetheless quite helpful to anon-specialist like myself.

I don't know any Icelandic and thus cannotspeak to the truth of the translation in sound or sense.However, itsbeauty in English is gripping.

Any reader of Tolkien will have a shock ofrecognition in encountering this book.Several names, including bothThorin and Gandalf, will be instantly familiar, as will a certain ethos ofhall, host, mighty deeds, and far-off doom.Anyone wishing to exploreTolkien's literary roots should read the Edda and "Beowulf"; thisrendering of the Edda, the work of one of the great poets of the twentiethcentury (and a Tolkien acolyte to boot) is a superior choice.

It's a realshame that this book is out of print.Given the bestseller status of theHeany "Beowulf", another first-quality rendering of alliterativeNorthern verse could well have a successful life in today's market.Asthings stand the book is worth searching for.I recommend it as highly asI may. ... Read more

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While literary critics have given disproportionate attention to the work of Auden and MacNeice, this commentary gives equal attention to their contemporaries - Day Lewis and Spender. The author offers insights to their poetry, identifies undetected sources, and elucidates obscurities. By placing their poetry in its biographical and historical contexts, he demonstrates how four poets with similar social and educational backgrounds responded to the stresses of private life and uneasy times, while remaining continuously aware of each other's work. His chronological survey of their entire poetic output over 60 years dispels the notion that their chief interest is as representative writers of a single decade, "the 30s". ... Read more

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Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s. ... Read more

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W. H. Auden once defined light verse as the kind that is written by poets who are democratically in tune with their audience and whose language is straightforward and close to general speech.Given that definition, the 123 poems in this collection all qualify; they are as accessible as popular songs yet have the wisdom and profundity of the greatest poetry.

As I Walked Out One Evening contains some of Auden's most memorable verse: "Now Through the Night's Caressing Grip," "Lullaby:Lay your Sleeping Head, My Love," "Under Which Lyre," and "Funeral Blues."Alongside them are less familiar poems, including seventeen that have never before appeared in book form.Here, among toasts, ballads, limericks, and even a foxtrot, are "Song:The Chimney Sweepers," a jaunty evocation of love, and the hilarious satire "Letter to Lord Byron."By turns lyrical, tender, sardonic, courtly, and risqué, As I Walked Out One Evening is Auden at his most irresistible and affecting. ... Read more

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Excellent Introduction
This slim volumne is exemplary of how quantity is not an appropriate indicator of poetic genius. I would consider this book 'Auden- Lite'and a very apt first volume of Auden's poetry. The volume has several of Auden's famous poems like 'Funeral Blues' of the Four Weddings and a Funeral fame and 'Lullaby'. While it doesn't do complete justice to Auden's spritual side it has plenty of doggerel verse including 'Jam Tart' and some very amusing short poems. Auden's versatility is very impressive and there is an almost Edwardian charm coupled with a strikingly modern sensibility that make this anthology very enjoyable. ... Read more

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In New York, between 1946 and 1948, the scholar and poet Alan Ansen made rapid notes of Auden's inimitable conversation. This book is a record of Auden's private, offhand and sometimes wayward remarks and opinions about art, literature, music, politics, religion and sexuality. ... Read more

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W. H. Auden is perhaps the most important English language poet of the 20th century. He produced marvelous poems-even in his last days.However, critics and reviewers not only have not recognized the aesthetics of the poetry Auden wrote after 1965, but they have ignored or made prejudiced and disparaging remarks about it, thus diverting subsequent critical (and popular) attention from its remarkable virtues. The aim of W. H. Auden's Poetry: Mythos, Theory, and Practice is to clarify Auden's career-long interest in poetic theory and, above all, to show how his changing thoughts about poetry impelled him towards the production of the last three volumes of his verse.Because it links the poet's biographia literaria and his aesthetic vision, this book will appeal to poets as well as to students of writing-particularly those interested in the creative process and its correlation to artistic forms. Students of 20th-century American and British literature will find in these pages a comprehensive survey of Auden's thoughts about his art and the poetry of his predecessors as well as of his contemporaries. Teachers of Auden's works will appreciate the strong light such a survey casts on Auden's poetic practice. Engineers and architects, physicists and biologists, cultural critics, social scientists, philosophers, and especially Gestalt psychologists might well enjoy reading about the ways their fields have intersected and influenced the thinking of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and courageous poets. ... Read more

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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. ... Read more

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Don't believe the old man.
Auden is my favorite poet and has been since my college days in the 50's.(Yes. 1950's.) In those days the poems started with "Musee des Beaux Arts," included "Law Like Love" and "In Memory of W.B. Yeats." The songs started with "As I walked Out One Evening."
A fine clear voice, very even expressions, and sentiments that one could easily subscibe to. I tried to write like that (and in part succeeded). The copy in my library is dated 1945.
Recently I decided to share my love of Auden's poetry and ordered three copies of the book descibed in this listing. What a mistake! It appears that Auden after about 1940, and until the end of his apparently miserable life, changed his style and everything else about himself, AND rewrote, deleted and butchered his early work. What a sad revelation. Don't believe the old man.
I suggest you read the review by N. Dorward for Collected Poems (Modern Library) here at Amazon for more about this and WHICH AUDEN TO BUY AND READ.
Here it is in part--
"This volume makes me ultimately rather sad, that a poet with such enormous promise (the work he wrote in his early 20s is still utterly astonishing in its accomplishment & daring) never quite made good on it, & even came to hate much of his own best work. Turn to the _Selected Poems_ to get a better measure of what Auden was as a writer. "

One of the great poets of the twentieth century
Wystan Hugh (W. H.) Auden is rightly regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth century.He is one of my favorites because of his great skill with language, his ability to talk about everyday life in wonderfully insightful ways, and to sing while he helps us see what he sees.His even greater gift is to make his words feel as if they came from out of our own mind and heart.We want to possess them.

Yet, he was also a very learned man, but his learning always has a point about life rather than allowing him to step into a spotlight for our adulation.You can flip to any page of this volume and find something to wonder at.Even the plainest poems have depths to plumb and the seemingly obscure yield to patient reading.

While Auden has a somewhat complicated biography, it would be a mistake to get sidetracked in too many details.While knowing the life of an artist often aids our understanding of his work, it is also a mistake to see too many parallels in his work with the happenstance of his life.Great artists draw on their lives, but they also transcend them.

I am very grateful to have this volume in my library. ... Read more

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As both a politically engaged and stylistically versatile poet, W.H. Auden is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His work is not only widely studied and read, but has been used in musical scores and quoted in Hollywood films.

This guide to Auden’s compelling work offers:

• an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of Auden’s texts, from publication to the present
• an introduction to key critical texts and perspectives on Auden’s life and work, situated in a broader critical history
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of W.H. Auden and seeking not only a guide to his works but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.

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Two wooden stakes stood on the plain, On them I hung my clothes: Draped in linen, they looked well born, But, naked, I was a nobody. ... Read more

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Havamal Words of the High One
Very disappointing - a real waste of money: half of the "book" was blank pages. Why on earth did the publisher not add illustrations or make the print bigger and the bookcover smaller? Hardly worth keeping.

Breathtaking!
Auden's work is deep and emotional and heartfelt and it cuts to the core of the human condition.I highly recommend this book. ... Read more

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Enriched by an awareness of modern critical approaches Professor Smith's stimulating study offers the reader fresh insights into Auden's significance both in his own time and today. ... Read more

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In 1951, Jacques Barzun, W. H. Auden, and Lionel Trilling joined together to form the editorial board of the Readers' Subscription Book Club. Thus began a venture unique in the annals of American culture. Never before or since have three such eminent intellectuals collaborated to bring books to the attention of the general public.

Now, a half century later, A Company of Readers tells the story of this extraordinary partnership and presents for the first time a selection of essays from the publications of the Readers' Subscription Book Club and its successor, the Mid-Century Book Society.

As they composed their comments to club members, these distinguished editors freely shared with each other their notes and drafts. The result is criticism of the highest order: smart, humane, learned -- in short, stuff that makes for damn good reading. And because these pieces were written for the general public by men who knew that books still mattered, perhaps no other collection of essays gives so natural and vivid a picture of the cultural landscape at midcentury.

Together, Auden, Barzun, and Trilling would plunge into a pile of books and pick out what they liked, what they thought would instruct and delight. What they chose may surprise you. Here is Auden on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, Barzun on Virginia Woolf's Writer's Diary, and Trilling on Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Each book, whether weighty or light, summoned from the editors a spirited appraisal, in language that welcomed any kind of reader.

The Mid-Century club disbanded in 1963, but its legacy lives on in these pages. A Company of Readers is essential to admirers of this illustrious trio, and it offers a window on an America in which books took center stage. ... Read more

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The Culture of "Inclusiveness"
While I was growing up in Chicago, one of my greatest pleasures was listening to classical music while reading the latest selection from the Readers' Subscription Club to which I belonged. That was almost 50 years ago (!) and yet how vividly I recall pouring over brief but brilliant essays in the latest edition of The Griffin (the monthly bulletin) to select titles to order and then, several weeks later, reading those selected as soon as they arrived. (By the way, I found Bach's "Goldberg Variations" to be an ideal companion to my reading, regardless of subject matter.) In this volume, with a Foreword by Jacques Barzun, followed by an Introduction by editor Arthur Krystal, we have a rich and varied selection of the uncollected writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling who, from 1951 until 1963, served as editors of the Readers' Subscription Club which later became the Mid-Century Book Society. As I began to read this book, I recognized only a few of the 45 essays which Krystal has organized as follows:

Biography and Belles Lettres (e.g. Barzun's "The Artist as Scapegoat")

History and Social Thought (Auden's "Apologies to the Iroquois")

Novels and Novelists (e.g. Trilling's "A Triumph of the Comic View")

Music, Theater, and Fine Arts (e.g. Barzun's "Why Talk About Art?")

Poetry (.e.g. Auden's "T.S. Eliot So Far")

A Round-robin (i.e. all three editors collaborated on "The New Auden Shakespeare" and "Jameschoice for January."

Krystal then provides an "Editor's Note," followed by two appendices: Complete List of Essays and Reviews from The Griffin and The Mid-Century, and, Essays from The Griffin and The Mid-Century Published Elsewhere.

After reading all of the selections in this volume, I now realize and appreciate what I did not (and probably could not) so many years ago: the three erudite and eloquent authors of the selections never "wrote down" to their readers while providing an intellectual, aesthetic, and (at times) social context for each of the authors and works discussed.

In the Foreword, Barzun explains that "As critics we had one trait in common: none of us applied a theory or system. Apart from this unifying mode, our tendencies and backgrounds differed widely, surely a desirable diversity for the purposes of the club." He goes on to point out that they were guided by "the principle of what Trilling was the first to call 'cultural criticism,' that is, criticism inspired by whatever is relevant to the work. Its genesis, form, and meaning have roots in the culture where it appears, and it is also unique through its author's own uniqueness. To us, none of this was new. We were cultural critics with no need of a doctrine, for the essence of culture is inclusiveness." In the Introduction, Krystal then provides a brief explanation of how and why the Club was founded, what happened throughout its eleven years and six months of existence, and what he views as its unique contributions. Auden, Barzun, and Trilling "were like those classical musicians who, upon leaving work at the symphony, head downtown to play jazz all night in a smoky club." No small part of the "pleasure they derived from playing together...lay in the knowledge that they were performing for a literate audience who had come expressly to hear them." This simile is apt.

Who will most enjoy reading this book? Certainly those who were once a member of either Club and have so many pleasant memories of their own associated with the monthly interaction with the three editors as well as with the subjects they discussed. But countless others, "non-members" if you will, who will also be intellectually stimulated while thoroughly enjoying the pleasure of the three editors' company. Jacques Barzun was right: "The essence of culture is inclusiveness." ... Read more