City without walls,: And other poems,

by W.H. Auden

London, Faber & Faber, 1969, 8vo tutta tela sovraccoperta illustrata, pp. 124

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Unfinished

Hardcover

First published September 1, 1969

About the author

Poems, published in such collections as Look, Stranger! (1936) and The Shield of Achilles (1955), established importance of British-American writer and critic Wystan Hugh Auden in 20th-century literature.

In and near Birmingham, he developed in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent schools and studied at Christ church, Oxford. From 1927, Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship despite briefer but more intense relations with other men. Auden passed a few months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.

He then spent five years from 1930 to 1935, teaching in English schools and then traveled to Iceland and China for books about his journeys. People noted stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide attention at the age of 23 years in 1930 with his first book, Poems ; The Orators followed in 1932.

Three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 to 1938 built his reputation in a left-wing politics.

People best know this Anglo for love such as "Funeral Blues," for political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939," for culture and psychology, such as The Age of Anxiety , and for religion, such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." In 1939, partly to escape a liberal reputation, Auden moved to the United States. Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship to 1939. In 1939, Auden fell in lust with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage.

From 1941, Auden taught in universities. This relationship ended in 1941, when Chester Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship.

Auden taught in universities through 1945. His work, including the long For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror , in the 1940s focused on religious themes. He attained citizenship in 1946.

The title of his long The Age of Anxiety , a popular phrase, described the modern era; it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. From 1947, he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia. From 1947, Auden and Chester Kallman lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation and often collaborated on opera libretti, such as The Rake's Progress for music of Igor Stravinsky until death of Auden.

Occasional visiting professorships followed in the 1950s. From 1956, he served as professor at Oxford. He wintered in New York and summered in Ischia through 1957. From 1958, he wintered usually in New York and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.

He served as professor at Oxford to 1961; his popular lectures with students and faculty served as the basis of his prose The Dyer's Hand in 1962.

Auden, a prolific prose essayist, reviewed political, psychological and religious subjects, and worked at various times on documentary films, plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his controversial and influential career, views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as claim of Joseph Brodsky of his "greatest mind of the twentieth century."

He wintered in Oxford in 1972/1973 and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, until the end of his life.

After his death, films, broadcasts, and popular media enabled people to know and ton note much more widely "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," t

Reviews

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certainly a good book of poems and an interesting book of poems. I did not enjoy it as much as I was expecting to--the poems in City Without Walls by and large are lacking the astonishing rhetorical beauty and elegance of the earlier poems with which I am familiar (like "Funeral Blues" and "Musee de Beaux Artes")--but it was certainly worth reading and well-put-together. My favorite poem was absolutely the title piece, a fragmentary and kaleidoscopic poem that begins,

"Those fantastic forms, fang-sharp,
bone-bare, that in Byzantine painting
were a shorthand for the Unbounded
beyond the Pale, unpoliced spaces
where dragons dwelt and demons roamed,

It was smart and funny and serious all at once in a way that several of the other pieces in this collection failed to be (for example his "Song of the Ogres" and "Song of the Devil"). He was often attempting to make clear moral and social points in light, urbane satire. The light touch and flawless polish are everywhere--even with (for me) a backing away from a sort of rhetorical power in his most famous poems, you can see a sort of glimmering patrician observation in these pieces that attacks both insistent conservative conventionality and what he seems to see as indiscriminate and undiscriminating revolution. There's a sort of moralism to the book, but it is unusual in its mode, for me, more reminiscent of Jane Austen than any other particular strand of such writing (though I find Austen's to be, I think, more successful). The collection also has a hefty component of commissioned and occasional work which might also be part of why it didn't land as successfully for me as I was hoping, since I have a mixed relationship to occasional verse.

[Angelique · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the bulk of these - even if I wasn't sure what he was saying, I loved the language and the naughtiness and just YUM. I especially liked:

Epithalamium

Profile (without a watch he would never know when to feel hungry or horny) the whole reason I bought it.

Since (I at least can learn to live with obesity and a little fame)

Song of the Ogres ( Dear, dear! Life's exactly what it looks, love may triumph in the books, not here.)

Lullaby (he's great at rhymes for kids)

[Razzle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good volume if you would like to feel a little stupid.

personal favorites:

"Ode to Terminus - on the human relation to science

"Fairgrounds" - vividly detailed description of...fairgrounds

"Since" - getting old

"River Profile" - repetition with a difference on the course of a river and the course of humanity

"Amor Loci" - oh, love

[Daniel Bragen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh? Some great poems (The Horatians, Since, Partition) and songs (The Trials of Great Souls) but otherwise forgettable. I do find Auden pretty funny though.

“True Love enjoys
twenty-twenty vision,
but talks like a myopic”

[Ace · Rating 3 out of 5]

not a huge fan but it was ok

[Adam Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really fine.