Selected Poems

✍ Scribed by Auden, W. H

• Book ID: 108049450
• Publisher: Vintage
• Year: 1979
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 4 MB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0394725069

✦ Synopsis

Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home
in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the
disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language
and event. In this, as in almost everything else, he differed
from his modernist predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence,
Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a
flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was
unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension
of the vernacular. All of this Auden rejected. His
continuing subject was the task of the present moment :
erotic and political tasks in his early poems, ethical and
religious ones later. When Auden looked back into history,
it was to seek the causes of his present condition, that he
might act better and more effectively in the future. The- past
his poems envisioned was never a southern classical domain
of unreflective elegance, as it was for the modernists, but a
past that had always been ruined, a northern industrial landscape
marred by the same violence and sorrow that marred
his own. [...]

This selection includes poems chosen from all of Auden's
books of verse ; a note on sources may be found at the b ack.
The texts are those of first publication in book form, modified
only by the rare minor revisions Auden made within a few
months of publication, and by the correction of misprints.
The arrangement is chronological, except where Auden arranged
a group of poems written at different times into a
single sequence ; dates
·
of composition are appended to each
poem. I have tried to include examples from the full range of
Auden's work in all its enormous variety of form, rhetoric
and content; the only major formal omission, I believe, results
from the impossibility of including either of the two long
verse-letters, which took up too many pages to reprint in full
and proved unamenable to abridgment. One long poem, "The
Sea and the Mirror," is printed complete, and excerpts from
other longer works are included only in cases where Auden
printed the same excerpts as separate poems. The titles, or
lack of titles in the early work, correspond to the usage in
the first editions; the titles used for excerpts from "The Age
of Anxiety" are those Auden used when he printed them in
periodicals. No selection from a great poet has ever been
satisfactory-a rule I know has not been broken by this one.

[From the Preface]