Selected Poems

Product Description
This significantly expanded edition of W. H. Auden’s
Selected Poems adds twenty poems to the hundred in the original edition, broadening its focus to better reflect the enormous wealth of form, rhetoric, tone, and content in Auden’s work. Newly included are such favorites as “Funeral Blues” and other works that represent Auden’s lighter, comic side, giving a fuller picture of the range of his genius. Also new are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure to younger generations of readers and a revised introduction that draws on recent additions to knowledge about Auden.

As in the original edition, the new
Selected Poems makes available the preferred original versions of some thirty poems that Auden revised later in life, making it the best source for enjoying the many facets of Auden’s art in one volume.
From Publishers Weekly
One of the 20th century’s greatest poets, Auden (1907–1973) has also joined the ranks of its most popular. His “Funeral Blues,” a 16-line song about lost love, became a widespread favorite after its use in the film
Four Weddings and a Funeral; his “Sept. 1, 1939” (“Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return”) seemed to be everywhere after September 11, 2001, as readers used its somber public voice to make sense of a senseless day. Mendelson—Auden’s literary executor, and the man who knows more than anyone else alive about Auden’s life and writings—has already assembled the standard books Auden fans know, among them an earlier 100-poem
Selected, which included poems famous during Auden’s life, such as “Sept. 1” and “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” but excluded some of his finest light verse—the tongue-in-cheek self-descriptive haiku series called “Profiles,” for example, the barbed wartime quatrains of “Leap Before You Look,” and “Funeral Blues” itself. Mendelson now rectifies those faults, adds 17 more poems and amplifies his articulate preface, just in time for the centennial of Auden’s birth. The volume reveals a poet by turns charming and authoritative, masterful and humble, deftly evasive and ringingly quotable.
(Feb.)
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From the Inside Flap
This edition presents the original versions of many poems, which Auden revised to conform to his evolving political and literary attitudes later in his career. In this volume, Edward Mendelson has restored the early versions of some thirty poems generally considered to be superior to the later versions, allowing the reader to see the entire range of Auden’s work. Selected and edited by Edward Mendelson
About the Author
W. H. Auden (1907-73) was born in York, England, and educated at Oxford. During the 1930s he was the leader of a left-wing literary group that included Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. With Isherwood he wrote three verse plays. He lived in Germany during the early days of Nazism, and was a stretcher-bearer for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Auden’s first volume of poetry appeared in 1930. Later volumes include
Spain (1937),
New Year Letter (1941),
For the Time Being, a
Christmas Oratorio (1945),
The Age of Anxiety (1947; Pulitzer Prize),
Nones (1951),
The Shield of Achilles (1955),
Homage to Clio (1960),
About the House (1965),
Epistle of a Godson (1972), and
Thank You, Fog (1974). His other works include the libretto, with his companion Chester Kallman, for Stravinsky’s opera
The Rake’s Progress (1953);
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970); and
The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (1968). In 1939 Auden moved to the United States and became a citizen in 1946, and beginning that year taught at a number of American colleges and universities. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford. Subsequently he lived in a number of countries, including Italy and Austria, and in 1971 he returned to England. He was awarded the National Medal for Literature