Collected Poems

(, Main)

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This edition includes all the poems that Auden wished to preserve, in a text that includes his final revisions, with corrections based on the latest research. In a new preface, Edward Mendelson offers a critical appreciation of Auden, as well as explanation of the history of the text and the editorial principles that he has followed. The "Collected Poems" covers the full range of Auden's extraordinary output, divided into sections that corresponded to what Auden referred to as chapters in his life: the moment in 1933 when he first knew 'exactly what it means to love one's neighbour 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; and his return to England in 1972.

Author Bio

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. Edward Mendelson is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His books include Early Auden, Later Auden, and The Things That Matter.