The first of two volumes of the eagerly anticipated first complete edition of Auden's poems-including some that have never been published before
W. H. Auden (1907-1973) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his reputation has only grown since his death. Published on the hundredth anniversary of the year in which he began to write poetry, this is the first of two volumes of the first complete edition of Auden's poems. Edited, introduced, and annotated by renowned Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, this definitive edition includes all the poems Auden wrote for publication, in their original texts, and all his later revised versions, as well as poems and songs he never published, some of them printed here for the first time.
This volume traces the development of Auden's early career, and contains all the poems, including juvenilia, that he published or submitted for publication, from his first printed work, in 1927, at age twenty, through the poems he wrote during his first months in America, in 1939, when he was thirty-two. The book also includes poems that Auden wrote during his adult career with the expectation that he might publish them, but which he never did; song lyrics that he wrote to be set to music by Benjamin Britten, but which he never put into print; and verses that he wrote for magazines at schools where he was teaching.
The main text presents the poems in their original published versions. The notes include the extensive revisions that he made to his poems over the course of his career, and provide explanations of obscure references.
The second volume of this edition, Poems, Volume 2: 1940-1973, is also available.
Title: The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I: 1927-1939 (The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, 1)
Author: W.H Auden
ISBN: 9780691219295
Binding:
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: 2022-08-09
Number of Pages: 848
Weight: 1.2984 kg
Mendelson is to be congratulated on this magnificent addition to our generation's definitive Auden. ---John Fuller, Times Literary Supplement
A dazzling, scholarly triumph. ---Michael Dirda, Washington Post
[Auden's] oeuvre has been given a new life. . . . [in these] two new and heavily annotated volumes. . . . [Mendelson's] mastery of this sprawling material is legendary. ---Brad Leithauser, Wall Street Journal
Mendelson has championed a reassessment of the poet's later work. He has not achieved this through polemic, but rather through a patient and careful effort. . . . I have been reading and teaching and writing about Auden's poetry for many years, but I have taken the opportunity offered by these two volumes to try, as best I can, to encounter it all anew. ---Alan Jacobs, Harper's Magazine
Exhilaratingly prospective. . . . some of the most vivid poems ever committed to English . . . these two books are a monument to the acumen, scholarship, and perseverance of Edward Mendelson. ---Ron Horning, Brooklyn Rail
Magnificent. . . . Mendelson's Auden has long been regarded as a monument of literary scholarship, and these two heavy poetry volumes complete the grounds for that acclaim. . . . An amazing thicket of scholarship and commentary draped around some of the most-studied and most-quoted poetry of the 20th century. ---Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review
To read Auden's Complete Works therefore is not just to encounter the inventions of a polymathic, often ingenious writer and poet, but to enter into a 'whole climate of opinion,' to explore an age by way of one of its representative figures. . . . Edifying. ---James Matthew Wilson, National Review
The new two-volume set of W. H. Auden's complete poems, meticulously assembled and presented by Edward Mendelson, is highly recommended. ---David Lehman, Best American Poetry blog
This book is so good. ---Michael Glover, The Tablet