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The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939
All of Auden's books of poems from the 1930s, including previously unpublished poems, are augmented by selections from his essays, reviews, film scripts, and stage and radio plays of the same period
492 pages, Paperback
First published January 12, 1978
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About the author
W.H. Auden
617 books1,061 followersPoems, 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
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
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 29, 2021
I found Auden's poetry a mess. Obviously, his poetry is often of the highest quality and includes some universally loved poems. Even lesser work is frequently of great interest and worth reading. But his so called Collected Poems is not only a mere selection, leaving out some work that really is essential (like The Orators, which I bought as a separate volume before finding it again in The English Auden), and arranged by Auden himself in an entirely unhelpful way, but also includes alterations to many poems by Auden himself that are neither an improvement nor of sufficient interest to want to kept track of them; they just annoyed me.
Much more interesting is to work with The English Auden, a different collection by Edward Mendelson, which conforms to the order of writing and is grouped correctly into the volumes as published, preserves the earlier and more attractive versions of the poems, and loses litle by being limited to the years 1927 - 1939. It also gathers a selection of Auden's prose writing and that is interesting too. For anyone who can absorb all this material, then good luck with the remainder in the Collected Poems. Once I found it, I just confined my attention to this collection.
When reading alongside a biography, which I like to do, it is really only worthwhile to use The English Auden. The particular biography I chose (there are a number I know) was not sufficiently detailed since much of Auden's poetry is frankly obscure, so I also turned to W H Auden - A Commentary by John Fuller as a valuable refrence source for each and every poem. This supplied some fascinating red herrings and side alleys to explore, though it is excessive for anyone who does not intend to spend serious time on Auden's work.
Just for comparison, my ideal poetry collection was one for Seamus Heaney, and came in the form of a boxed set of every book he published , each in its orginal form. It was possible to follow Heaney's writing career in a convenient, accessible way that, bluntly, is a huge contrast to the unwieldy, confusing and often tiresome effort of searching out the relevant Auden poems alongside supporting reference materials. With Heaney I could slip each volume in turn into a coat pocket and carry it around with me. With Auden I needed a wheelbarrow to move from one room to another.
After all that I am not even much of a fan.
Much more interesting is to work with The English Auden, a different collection by Edward Mendelson, which conforms to the order of writing and is grouped correctly into the volumes as published, preserves the earlier and more attractive versions of the poems, and loses litle by being limited to the years 1927 - 1939. It also gathers a selection of Auden's prose writing and that is interesting too. For anyone who can absorb all this material, then good luck with the remainder in the Collected Poems. Once I found it, I just confined my attention to this collection.
When reading alongside a biography, which I like to do, it is really only worthwhile to use The English Auden. The particular biography I chose (there are a number I know) was not sufficiently detailed since much of Auden's poetry is frankly obscure, so I also turned to W H Auden - A Commentary by John Fuller as a valuable refrence source for each and every poem. This supplied some fascinating red herrings and side alleys to explore, though it is excessive for anyone who does not intend to spend serious time on Auden's work.
Just for comparison, my ideal poetry collection was one for Seamus Heaney, and came in the form of a boxed set of every book he published , each in its orginal form. It was possible to follow Heaney's writing career in a convenient, accessible way that, bluntly, is a huge contrast to the unwieldy, confusing and often tiresome effort of searching out the relevant Auden poems alongside supporting reference materials. With Heaney I could slip each volume in turn into a coat pocket and carry it around with me. With Auden I needed a wheelbarrow to move from one room to another.
After all that I am not even much of a fan.
August 28, 2025
I really like Auden’s sudden adjectives (‘nondescript’, ‘appalling’, ‘public’); I like his too-often sing-song-y rhythms less. But what I like most is that he is one of the few poets I’ve ever read who could use the words ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ to convey something like what I take the word to mean: a thick and deep and powerful idea, something that could plausibly be considered the chief virtue of human life. Precisely because this view of freedom is pretty close to the truth, and the truth is inevitably messy and ugly, it is much harder to fashion it into successful poetry than the cleanness—even cosiness—of both radicalism and reaction. And so it is a great achievement that Auden managed for a time to be, not just a poet who happened to be a (political) liberal, but a (comprehensive)
liberal poet
. This out-of-print volume is excellent, really worth seeking out on Abebooks in preference to the ‘collected’ or any of the currently-in-print ‘selecteds’, and it has a nice amount of Auden’s prose and criticism too; but it doesn’t reproduce Another Time in full, and if you’ve not already read that you should start there.
February 25, 2023
I am just not an Auden guy. He seems desperate for rhyme, cramped by his own forms. I liked a few poems but not enough to call Auden a poet I enjoy. I’ve never understood why his elegy for Yeats is so admired, but the one about Beaux Arts is great. I skimmed a handful of his reviews and then stopped.
November 26, 2009
Great collection, in which you can see Auden's growth from a fairly dull symbolist/modernist type to something much more interesting, as his poetry gains in both clarity and depth. Personal favorites are XXI, XXVI and XXXVII from 1938-39; XVII from 1933, XXIV and XXV from 1929, and especially sonnet XXV from the sequence 'In Time of War:
Nothing is given: we must find our law.
Great buildings jostle in the sun for
domination
Behind them stretch like sorry vegetation
The low recessive houses of the poor.
We have no destiny assigned us:
Nothing is certain but the body; we plan
To better ourselves; the hospitals alone
remind us
Of the equality of man.
Children are really loved here, even by
police:
They speak of years before the big were
lonely
And will be lost.
And only
The brass bands throbbing in the parks
foretell
Some future reign of happiness and peace.
We learn to pity and rebel.
Nothing is given: we must find our law.
Great buildings jostle in the sun for
domination
Behind them stretch like sorry vegetation
The low recessive houses of the poor.
We have no destiny assigned us:
Nothing is certain but the body; we plan
To better ourselves; the hospitals alone
remind us
Of the equality of man.
Children are really loved here, even by
police:
They speak of years before the big were
lonely
And will be lost.
And only
The brass bands throbbing in the parks
foretell
Some future reign of happiness and peace.
We learn to pity and rebel.
January 30, 2014
This is the easiest way to read the unrevised Auden, before second thoughts and idiosyncratic scruples edited away beloved (if fruitful of argument) lines. The most obvious example is in the Yeats elegy, where we still get,
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
April 17, 2009
W.H. Auden is one of my favorite poets. I admire the Essays and Reviews section.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews