W H Auden Books In Order

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden

W. H. Auden called opera the ‘last refuge of the High Style,’ and considered it the one art in which the grand manner survived the ironic levelings of modernity. He began writing libretti soon after he arrived in America in 1939 and abandoned his earlier attempts to write public, political drama. Opera gave him the opportunity to rise to the high style in public, not in an attempt to elevate his own status as a poet, but in service of the heroic voice of the singers. These works present their mythical actions with a direct intensity unlike anything in even his greatest poems. In this volume of Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretti, extensive historical and textual notes trace the history of the production and revision of the works and provide full texts of early scenarios, as well as abandoned and rewritten scenes. Almost all the works included here were previously published in incomplete and often inaccessible editions or were never published at all. The book prints for the first time the full text of Paul Bunyan, Auden’s first libretto, which he wrote for music by Benjamin Britten. It also includes Auden and Kallman’s The Rake’s Progress, written for Igor Stravinsky, and Delia, written for Stravinsky but never set to music. The book continues with Auden and Kallman’s two libretti written for music by Hans Werner Henze, Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids, and their adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost, composed by Nicolas Nabokov. It also contains their translation of The Magic Flute, with its scenes reordered for greater dramatic coherence and added dialogue for sharper mythical significance, and their antimasque, The Entertainment of the Senses, for music by John Gardner. The book contains two radio plays The Dark Valley, a monologue written by Auden alone, and The Rocking Horse Winner, written with James Stern and based on a story by D. H. Lawrence. Also included are the unpublished masque that Auden wrote for Kallman’s twenty second birthday, the unpublished versions of The Dutchess of Malfi that Auden prepared with Bertolt Brecht, scenarios for a film script and a libretto that were never completed, Auden’s narrative for the medieval Play of Daniel, two narratives for documentary films, and his song lyrics written for Man of La Mancha before the producer decided to use a different lyricist.

As I Walked Out One Evening

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 risqu , As I Walked Out One Evening is Auden at his most irresistible and affecting.

Complete Works of WH Auden: Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, 1926-1938

In 1928 Stephen Spender hand printed thirty copies of a small volume of poems by his friend W. H. Auden the first published book by a man who was to become the dominant literary figure of his generation and one of the century’s greatest poets. Sixty years later, Princeton University Press inaugurates an eight volume edition of the complete works of Auden, which is intended to serve as the definitive text for all the works Auden published or intended to publish in the form in which he expected to see them printed: his plays and other drama, libretti, essays and reviews, and poems. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden will provide a unique opportunity to solve the numerous textual problems connected with the severe revisions Auden made in his own works. The texts will be newly edited from Auden’s manuscripts by Edward Mendelson, the literary executor of the Auden estate. As presented in this edition, they will be absolutely clean, with the notes appearing only at the ends of the volumes, along with variant readings from all published versions, as well as hitherto unpublished drafts or revisions. Also included will be introductions placing the works in the context of literary traditions and relating them to Auden’s life and times. As planned, the first volume of the series contains plays and other drama, and the second volume will include the libretti. The essays and reviews will appear in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes, and the seventh and eighth volumes will contain the poems. Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1928 1938 This volume contains Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s dramatic extravaganzas The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F 6, and On the Frontier. It also includes the two versions of Paid on Both Sides which are so different as to constitute two works and Auden’s satiric revue The Dance of Death. Two plays appear in print for the first time, Auden and Isherwood’s The Enemies of a Bishop and Auden’s The Chase. Also included are Auden’s prose and verse written for documentary films, a cabaret sketch, and an unpublished radio script. Many of the texts include poems by the young Auden that have never been published before. The extensive historical and textual notes trace the complex history of the production and revision of these plays, including full texts of rewritten scenes. During the years when these works were created, Auden moved from a ‘poetry of isolation’ to more expansive and public writing. After he left Oxford at age twenty one, during the summer of 1928, he wrote the tragicomic charade Paid on Both Sides. During the next ten years, until he left England for America, he created the increasingly ambitious works for stage, film, and broadcast that appear in this volume. The most important of these plays were written in collaboration with Isherwood. As the world political situation worsened, Isherwood and Auden’s style combined the energy of popular entertainment with the urgency of sacramental ritual.

Play of Daniel

A liturgical drama set to music, reconstructed from a medieval manuscript in the British Museum. The edition presents a version of the work which is both historically accurate and creates a living performance. No polyphony or harmony has been added, but doubling in unison or in octaves is used extensively. There are 15 parts for solo voices a mixture of sopranos, tenors, baritones, bas*ses and a choir of sopranos and men’s voices. The narration is by W. H. Auden.

W. H. Auden’s Book of Light Verse: An Anthology

Auden’s celebrated anthology of light verse is packed with surprising finds while also offering a striking rethinking of the poetic canon. Commissioned by Oxford University Press in the 1930s, when Auden’s own work was at its boldest, the book caught its original publisher off guard. For it is less a collection of humorous verses than a celebration of the popular voice in English, in which the work of great satirists like Swift and Byron keeps company with ballads, chanteys, ditties, nursery rhymes, street calls, bathroom graffiti, epitaphs, folk songs, vaudeville turns, limericks, and blues. Turning away from the post Romantic cult of the sentimental lyric, Auden features poetry that is clear, enjoyable, and, no matter its age, absolutely modern. This new edition includes previously censored poems, together with Auden’s remarkable introduction and a new preface by his literary executor, Edward Mendelson.

The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays

In this volume, W. H. Auden assembled, edited, and arranged the best of his prose writing, including the famous lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The result is less a formal collection of essays than an extended and linked series of observations on poetry, art, and the observation of life in general. The Dyer’s Hand is a surprisingly personal, intimate view of the author’s mind, whose central focus is poetry Shakespearean poetry in particular but whose province is the author’s whole experience of the twentieth century.

Forewords and Afterwords

The essays in this collection were written as reviews, mainly for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, on books by or about Alexander Pope, Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and A. E. Housman, or as introductions to editions of the classical Greek writers, the Protestant mystics, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Tennyson, Grimm and Andersen, Poe, G. K. Chesterton, Paul Val ry, and others. Throughout, these prose pieces reveal the same wit and intelligence as well as the vision that sparked the brilliance of Auden’s poetry.

The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard

Translated from the Danish by Walter Lowrie, David Swenson, and Alexander DruThe Danish philosopher Kierkegaard is one of the master thinkers of the modern age, a defining influence on existentialism and on twentieth century theology, and this brilliantly tailored selection from his vast and varied writings made by the great English poet W.H Auden is a perfect introduction to his work. Auden’s inspired and incisive response to a thinker who had done much to shape his own beliefs is a fundamental reading of an author whose spirit remains as radical as ever more than 150 years after he wrote.

Lectures on Shakespeare

‘W. H. Auden, poet and critic, will conduct a course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research beginning Wednesday. Mr. Auden has announced that in his course…
he proposes to read all Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order.’ The New York Times reported this item on September 27, 1946, giving notice of a rare opportunity to hear one of the century’s great poets comment on one of the greatest poets of all time. Published here for the first time, these lectures now make Auden’s thoughts on Shakespeare available widely. Painstakingly reconstructed by Arthur Kirsch from the notes of students who attended, primarily Alan Ansen, who became Auden’s secretary and friend, the lectures afford remarkable insights into Shakespeare’s plays as well as the sonnets.A remarkable lecturer, Auden could inspire his listeners to great feats of recall and dictation. Consequently, the poet’s unique voice, often down to the precise details of his phrasing, speaks clearly and eloquently throughout this volume. In these lectures, we hear Auden alluding to authors from Homer, Dante, and St. Augustine to Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and T. S. Eliot, drawing upon the full range of European literature and opera, and referring to the day’s newspapers and magazines, movies and cartoons. The result is an extended instance of the ‘live conversation’ that Auden believed criticism to be. Notably a conversation between Auden’s capacious thought and the work of Shakespeare, these lectures are also a prelude to many ideas developed in Auden’s later prose a prose in which, one critic has remarked, ‘all the artists of the past are alive and talking among themselves.’ Reflecting the twentieth century poet’s lifelong engagement with the crowning masterpieces of English literature, these lectures add immeasurably to both our understanding of Auden and our appreciation of Shakespeare.

The Sea and the Mirror

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.