What do you think?
Rate this book
Collected Poems
Between 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face. Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken.
This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.
This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.
960 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
About the author
W.H. Auden
587 books989 followersPoems, published in such collections as
Look, Stranger!
(1936) and
The Shield of Achilles
(1955), established importance of British-American writer and critic Wystan Hugh Auden in 20th-century literature.
In and near Birmingham, he developed in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent schools and studied at Christ church, Oxford. From 1927, Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship despite briefer but more intense relations with other men. Auden passed a few months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.
He then spent five years from 1930 to 1935, teaching in English schools and then traveled to Iceland and China for books about his journeys. People noted stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide attention at the age of 23 years in 1930 with his first book, Poems ; The Orators followed in 1932.
Three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 to 1938 built his reputation in a left-wing politics.
People best know this Anglo for love such as "Funeral Blues," for political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939," for culture and psychology, such as The Age of Anxiety , and for religion, such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." In 1939, partly to escape a liberal reputation, Auden moved to the United States. Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship to 1939. In 1939, Auden fell in lust with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage.
From 1941, Auden taught in universities. This relationship ended in 1941, when Chester Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship.
Auden taught in universities through 1945. His work, including the long For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror , in the 1940s focused on religious themes. He attained citizenship in 1946.
The title of his long The Age of Anxiety , a popular phrase, described the modern era; it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. From 1947, he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia. From 1947, Auden and Chester Kallman lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation and often collaborated on opera libretti, such as The Rake's Progress for music of Igor Stravinsky until death of Auden.
Occasional visiting professorships followed in the 1950s. From 1956, he served as professor at Oxford. He wintered in New York and summered in Ischia through 1957. From 1958, he wintered usually in New York and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.
He served as professor at Oxford to 1961; his popular lectures with students and faculty served as the basis of his prose The Dyer's Hand in 1962.
Auden, a prolific prose essayist, reviewed political, psychological and religious subjects, and worked at various times on documentary films, plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his controversial and influential career, views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as claim of Joseph Brodsky of his "greatest mind of the twentieth century."
He wintered in Oxford in 1972/1973 and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, until the end of his life.
After his death, films, broadcasts, and popular media enabled people to know and ton note much more widely "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," t
In and near Birmingham, he developed in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent schools and studied at Christ church, Oxford. From 1927, Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship despite briefer but more intense relations with other men. Auden passed a few months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.
He then spent five years from 1930 to 1935, teaching in English schools and then traveled to Iceland and China for books about his journeys. People noted stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide attention at the age of 23 years in 1930 with his first book, Poems ; The Orators followed in 1932.
Three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 to 1938 built his reputation in a left-wing politics.
People best know this Anglo for love such as "Funeral Blues," for political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939," for culture and psychology, such as The Age of Anxiety , and for religion, such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." In 1939, partly to escape a liberal reputation, Auden moved to the United States. Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship to 1939. In 1939, Auden fell in lust with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage.
From 1941, Auden taught in universities. This relationship ended in 1941, when Chester Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship.
Auden taught in universities through 1945. His work, including the long For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror , in the 1940s focused on religious themes. He attained citizenship in 1946.
The title of his long The Age of Anxiety , a popular phrase, described the modern era; it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. From 1947, he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia. From 1947, Auden and Chester Kallman lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation and often collaborated on opera libretti, such as The Rake's Progress for music of Igor Stravinsky until death of Auden.
Occasional visiting professorships followed in the 1950s. From 1956, he served as professor at Oxford. He wintered in New York and summered in Ischia through 1957. From 1958, he wintered usually in New York and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.
He served as professor at Oxford to 1961; his popular lectures with students and faculty served as the basis of his prose The Dyer's Hand in 1962.
Auden, a prolific prose essayist, reviewed political, psychological and religious subjects, and worked at various times on documentary films, plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his controversial and influential career, views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as claim of Joseph Brodsky of his "greatest mind of the twentieth century."
He wintered in Oxford in 1972/1973 and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, until the end of his life.
After his death, films, broadcasts, and popular media enabled people to know and ton note much more widely "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," t
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 97 reviews
January 10, 2024
CODA
From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all
our school text-books lie.
What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of,
being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.
August 1973.
(his last word...)
From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all
our school text-books lie.
What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of,
being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.
August 1973.
(his last word...)
April 4, 2017
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
. . W.H. Auden, "Twelve Songs," Song IX (1936)
Rather than pen a review of a "collection" of such sublimity in Auden's oeuvre, this is simply in homage.
Unless you're studying a poet, it's doubtful you read a book of poems beginning at page 1 and ending at, here, page 897. To me, a collection of poetry such as this, created by such an acclaimed and beloved poet, is really an assortment of comfort foods for the gods, full of epicurean pleasures to push a mortal's dopamine rush. This is poetry to be sampled, savoured and treasured over the years. After having this on my library card for a few months, I'm determined to purchase my own now.
I think most literati recognize Song IX of Auden's "Twelve Songs," which begins "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone...." (1936) (quoted in full in the endnote *), made popular in the modern day by the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). It's one of my favorites, but the most surprising delight for me has been "Academic Graffiti (In Memoriam Ogden Nash)" (1952, 1970), a fun and puckish poem, parts of which are quoted below:
*Song IX of Auden's "Twelve Songs":
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
. . W.H. Auden, "Twelve Songs," Song IX (1936)
Rather than pen a review of a "collection" of such sublimity in Auden's oeuvre, this is simply in homage.
Unless you're studying a poet, it's doubtful you read a book of poems beginning at page 1 and ending at, here, page 897. To me, a collection of poetry such as this, created by such an acclaimed and beloved poet, is really an assortment of comfort foods for the gods, full of epicurean pleasures to push a mortal's dopamine rush. This is poetry to be sampled, savoured and treasured over the years. After having this on my library card for a few months, I'm determined to purchase my own now.
I think most literati recognize Song IX of Auden's "Twelve Songs," which begins "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone...." (1936) (quoted in full in the endnote *), made popular in the modern day by the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). It's one of my favorites, but the most surprising delight for me has been "Academic Graffiti (In Memoriam Ogden Nash)" (1952, 1970), a fun and puckish poem, parts of which are quoted below:
St. Thomas Aquinas
Always regarded wine as
A medicinal juice
that helped him to deduce.
Ludvig van Beethoven
Believed it proven
That, for mortal dust,
What must be, must.
William Blake
Found Newton hard to take,
And was not enormously taken
With Francis Bacon.
Lord Byron
Once succumbed to a Siren:
His flesh was weak,
Hers Greek.
Dante
Was utterly enchanté
When Beatrice cried in tones that were peachy:
Noi siamo amici.
Thomas Hardy
Was never tardy
When summoned to fulfill
The Immanent Will.
No one could ever inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Into offering the slightest apology
For his Phenomenology.
Henry James
Abhorred the word Dames,
And always wrote "Mommas"
With inverted commas.
When the young Kant
Was told to kiss his aunt,
He obeyed the Categorical Must,
But only just.
Nietzsche
Had the habit as a teacher
Of cracking his joints
To emphasize his points.
Louis Pasteur,
So his colleagues aver,
Lived on excellent terms
With most of his germs.
Christina Rossetti
Thought it rather petty,
When her brother, D.G.,
Put laudanum in her tea.
When Sir Walter Scott
Made a blot,
He stamped with rage
And started a new page.
T. S. Eliot is quite at a loss
When clubwomen bustle across
. At literary teas,
. Crying:--"What, if you please,
Did you mean by The Mill on the Floss?"
*Song IX of Auden's "Twelve Songs":
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
July 24, 2007
People are always surprised to hear this is Auden's, but it is:
As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling-in-money,
The screamingly-funny,
And those who are very well hung.
As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling-in-money,
The screamingly-funny,
And those who are very well hung.
July 31, 2011
There is never a volume of Auden far from me. No matter who you are or what your background, he is a poet you can love.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
"Love has no ending.
"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
"I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
"The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world."
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
"In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
"In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
"Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
"O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
"O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
"O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked nelghbour
With your crooked heart."
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
March 18, 2023
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
This quite the compendium, a distillation of poetic possibilities. It is to be savored, cycles to be reread endlessly. I did feel at times an epistolary relationship heading backwards through time and innocence. This idea of Auden informed by the experiences of Brodsky and Arendt who knew him well towards the end and by of course Bunny Wilson who knew him so long. The Age of Anxiety and the long letter to Lord Byron are the apogee of modern poetry. It likely is that simple. Auden is self effacing, often painfully lonely and finds comfort if not hope in the reptilian banality of modern life.
Some poems are conversational. Many are baroque and carefully metered. There’s an appropriate homage to the origins of verse and philosophy and an intriguing study of our fettered selves during the manias of political economy and nuclear mortification.
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
This quite the compendium, a distillation of poetic possibilities. It is to be savored, cycles to be reread endlessly. I did feel at times an epistolary relationship heading backwards through time and innocence. This idea of Auden informed by the experiences of Brodsky and Arendt who knew him well towards the end and by of course Bunny Wilson who knew him so long. The Age of Anxiety and the long letter to Lord Byron are the apogee of modern poetry. It likely is that simple. Auden is self effacing, often painfully lonely and finds comfort if not hope in the reptilian banality of modern life.
Some poems are conversational. Many are baroque and carefully metered. There’s an appropriate homage to the origins of verse and philosophy and an intriguing study of our fettered selves during the manias of political economy and nuclear mortification.
June 16, 2013
673 pages of Auden’s poetry, from 1927, when he was 20, to 1972, the year before his death. I’m not going to pretend to have anything original to say about Auden and there are single poems of his about which a full review could be written. So this is just going to be some impressions.
First, this was a slog. I can certainly stand impressed with his intelligence (clearly a genius) and his skill with craft but I won’t be calling him a favorite. Though he is to be lauded as a serious poet who was also unafraid of humor, the majority of his poetry came across as monotone to me, which is why it was such a difficult volume to get through.
Having said that, I have to reverse myself a little and say that I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of the very long early poems. I dragged my heels about reading “New Years Letter” and “For the Time Being” but enjoyed them both and intend to read them again some time. The better known “Age of Anxiety” is awful (anglo saxon verse for anyone interested in contemporary examples of that form—but terribly dull). Though the phrase caught on and the attitude expressed may be considered historically important, I can see why no one reads the poem any longer or even knows where the phrase came from.
Another one of his supposedly great poems, “In Praise of Limestone,” I liked but would not call one of my favorites of his. I was particularly curious about it because it was one of the most selected poems when David Lehman of The Best American Poetry series asked all of his previous editors in the year 2000 edition to select what they thought were the 10 best poems of the 20th Century.
Since Auden was born in the UK but became a U.S. citizen, a question hovers around him whether he is a British poet or an American poet. I fall firmly on the side of calling him British. I see little in his poetry or temperament that makes him American. I think he was British to the core though he may also have loved New York City, Germany and Austria.
One of the reasons to read a “collected” or “complete” works is to see the development of another poet and to see overall what they wrote instead of simply what has received the official stamp of approval or which is easily anthologized. Auden wrote many poems dedicated to people. He wrote very long poems and very short poems. He wrote verse plays. He talked backed to earlier poets. He wrote occasional poems and he was commissioned to write poems. He also wrote aphorisms and silly rhymes. No denying he had scope even if he tended to write these different things in a similar tone. As a poet, it challenged me to consider my own lack of range or where I have not dared to try and fail--as he certainly did with some of his attempts. He was incredibly ambitious when young, tackling the big projects of his poetic predecessors with skill and aplomb, even cheekiness. He seemed less invested in impressing people as he aged and wrote more of homey things. I liked the cranky old man voice of his later poems the best.
Here are links to some of his poems I enjoyed:
First Things First: http://www.ashokkarra.com/2011/09/w-h...
Humor: The Ballad of Barnaby
http://literaryballadarchive.com/PDF/...
He had fun with diction. An extreme example, which he subtitled (a lexical exercise) is "Bad Night" (here a piece of the middle):
Instead of a facile
Five-minute trot
Far he must hirple,
Clumsied by cold,
Buffeted often
By blouts of hail
But keep this man away from my wedding. Here is a stanza from the "Epithalamion" he wrote for what appeared to be a relative.
Cool Hymen from Jealousy's
teratoid phantasms,
sulks, competitive headaches,
and Pride's monologue,
that won't listen but demands
tautological echoes,
ever refrain you.
That is the staid, urbane, intellectual voice that made me reluctant to dive in for more.
Here's the cranky (or here affronted) old man voice in "A Shock":
Housman was perfectly right
Our world rapidly worsens:
nothing now is so horrid
or silly it can't occur.
Still, I'm stumped by what happened
to upper-middle-class me,
born in '07 when Strauss
was starting on Elecktra,
gun-shy myopic grandchild
of Anglican clergymen,
suspicious of all passion,
including passionate love,
day-dreaming of leafy dells
that shelter carefree shepherds,
averse to violent weather,
pained by predator beasts,
shocked by boxing and blood-sports,
when I, I, I, if you please,
at Schwechat Flughafen was
frisked by a cop for weapons.
Though Auden often expressed a current mentality he observed, as in "Age of Anxiety." He was firmly old guard in most things. Not unpleasantly, not stodgy, but firmly rooted and unapologetic. One of his shorts (as he called them) is:
No, Surrealists, no! No, even the wildest of poems
must, like prose, must have a firm basis in staid common-sense.
So I've read Auden and have had the full view of him. He's easy to admire and it was interesting to see the projects he took on. But he's not my kind of guy. I would recommend others read a selected works first to see if he's your cup of tea before diving into 600+ pages. I had this on my shelf because I'd found it cheap. I don't regret reading it because a "selected" editor might have left out the poems I liked best, but it was a slog.
First, this was a slog. I can certainly stand impressed with his intelligence (clearly a genius) and his skill with craft but I won’t be calling him a favorite. Though he is to be lauded as a serious poet who was also unafraid of humor, the majority of his poetry came across as monotone to me, which is why it was such a difficult volume to get through.
Having said that, I have to reverse myself a little and say that I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of the very long early poems. I dragged my heels about reading “New Years Letter” and “For the Time Being” but enjoyed them both and intend to read them again some time. The better known “Age of Anxiety” is awful (anglo saxon verse for anyone interested in contemporary examples of that form—but terribly dull). Though the phrase caught on and the attitude expressed may be considered historically important, I can see why no one reads the poem any longer or even knows where the phrase came from.
Another one of his supposedly great poems, “In Praise of Limestone,” I liked but would not call one of my favorites of his. I was particularly curious about it because it was one of the most selected poems when David Lehman of The Best American Poetry series asked all of his previous editors in the year 2000 edition to select what they thought were the 10 best poems of the 20th Century.
Since Auden was born in the UK but became a U.S. citizen, a question hovers around him whether he is a British poet or an American poet. I fall firmly on the side of calling him British. I see little in his poetry or temperament that makes him American. I think he was British to the core though he may also have loved New York City, Germany and Austria.
One of the reasons to read a “collected” or “complete” works is to see the development of another poet and to see overall what they wrote instead of simply what has received the official stamp of approval or which is easily anthologized. Auden wrote many poems dedicated to people. He wrote very long poems and very short poems. He wrote verse plays. He talked backed to earlier poets. He wrote occasional poems and he was commissioned to write poems. He also wrote aphorisms and silly rhymes. No denying he had scope even if he tended to write these different things in a similar tone. As a poet, it challenged me to consider my own lack of range or where I have not dared to try and fail--as he certainly did with some of his attempts. He was incredibly ambitious when young, tackling the big projects of his poetic predecessors with skill and aplomb, even cheekiness. He seemed less invested in impressing people as he aged and wrote more of homey things. I liked the cranky old man voice of his later poems the best.
Here are links to some of his poems I enjoyed:
First Things First: http://www.ashokkarra.com/2011/09/w-h...
Humor: The Ballad of Barnaby
http://literaryballadarchive.com/PDF/...
He had fun with diction. An extreme example, which he subtitled (a lexical exercise) is "Bad Night" (here a piece of the middle):
Instead of a facile
Five-minute trot
Far he must hirple,
Clumsied by cold,
Buffeted often
By blouts of hail
But keep this man away from my wedding. Here is a stanza from the "Epithalamion" he wrote for what appeared to be a relative.
Cool Hymen from Jealousy's
teratoid phantasms,
sulks, competitive headaches,
and Pride's monologue,
that won't listen but demands
tautological echoes,
ever refrain you.
That is the staid, urbane, intellectual voice that made me reluctant to dive in for more.
Here's the cranky (or here affronted) old man voice in "A Shock":
Housman was perfectly right
Our world rapidly worsens:
nothing now is so horrid
or silly it can't occur.
Still, I'm stumped by what happened
to upper-middle-class me,
born in '07 when Strauss
was starting on Elecktra,
gun-shy myopic grandchild
of Anglican clergymen,
suspicious of all passion,
including passionate love,
day-dreaming of leafy dells
that shelter carefree shepherds,
averse to violent weather,
pained by predator beasts,
shocked by boxing and blood-sports,
when I, I, I, if you please,
at Schwechat Flughafen was
frisked by a cop for weapons.
Though Auden often expressed a current mentality he observed, as in "Age of Anxiety." He was firmly old guard in most things. Not unpleasantly, not stodgy, but firmly rooted and unapologetic. One of his shorts (as he called them) is:
No, Surrealists, no! No, even the wildest of poems
must, like prose, must have a firm basis in staid common-sense.
So I've read Auden and have had the full view of him. He's easy to admire and it was interesting to see the projects he took on. But he's not my kind of guy. I would recommend others read a selected works first to see if he's your cup of tea before diving into 600+ pages. I had this on my shelf because I'd found it cheap. I don't regret reading it because a "selected" editor might have left out the poems I liked best, but it was a slog.
November 3, 2007
I first became aware of Auden in my early teens after hearing a reading of Funeral Blues in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. That poem enchanted me and I have been an Auden fan since! This collection of poems may seem a bit daunting because of the size; good for picking up and reading a few at a time or getting lost in Auden's spell-binding language for hours at a time.
August 7, 2010
The greatest poet of the past 100 years.
December 14, 2010
I will be reading this book until I die.
March 27, 2011
How I have a degree in Literature and barely read Auden til this past Winter is beyond me. Amazing, amazing, amazing.
September 5, 2015
For a month or more now I've been dipping into a 900 page collection of poems by W.H.Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Since there's no way to "review" such a massive book, I'll divide this comment into two parts: I. Why You Should Read Auden and 2) Why You Should Not Read Auden.
I. Why You Should Read Auden:
--Auden was a master of virtually all poetic forms employed in English.
--Auden's range extended from the melancholy to the cheeky.
--Auden made poetry out of everyday life and friendships.
--Auden's Dichtung und Wahrheit is a marvelous exploration of the complex statement we all make at one time or another: "I love You."
--Auden's poem, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," underscores a fundamental fact about his poetry: he had thought through and gained command over virtually every dimension of human experience.
--Auden was not afraid to write biting verse about contemporary issues while preserving poetic distance and form (not giving in to shocking ranting, for example.)
--Auden's classical frame of reference could be challenging, but he still managed to write more directly and clearly than T.S. Eliot, whose mantle he was thought to have donned upon Eliot's departure from the scene.
--Auden managed to be intelligent in virtually every line he wrote; the connective tissue between his perceptions was his gift for analysis and valuation.
--Auden both embraced and transcended his homosexuality, normalizing the facts and truths.
II. Why You Should Not Read Auden
--Auden's been dead a long time now, so who cares?
--Poetic forms have been dead for a long time now, so who cares?
--Any poet who is ironically passionate about his passions isn't passionate enough to be passionate about.
--A poet who doesn't serve up the same stuff all the time cannot be trusted--did Auden ever have a thought he didn't transform into a line of poetry?
--Auden wasn't really the heir to Eliot, and he'd say so himself, challenging the notion of heirs altogether.
--Who has time for poetry that has a consistently gentle Olympian quality to it? I mean, who knows who Aphrodite and Achilles were? And again, who cares? Talk about dead, they were never even alive!
--Auden might have been gay, but he still was a male WASP who spent a lot of time at Oxford.
--Philip Larkin, the most overrated of English poets, has made perfectly clear that he thought Auden was overrated.
--Where did Auden come up with this Dictung und Warheit idea anyway? Who was Goethe? How do you even pronounce a name spelled like that?
--And he didn't stop at memorializing Sigmund Freud, he carried on about Henry James, as well. Something about his "heart, fastidious as a delicate nun..." What's that supposed to mean?
I. Why You Should Read Auden:
--Auden was a master of virtually all poetic forms employed in English.
--Auden's range extended from the melancholy to the cheeky.
--Auden made poetry out of everyday life and friendships.
--Auden's Dichtung und Wahrheit is a marvelous exploration of the complex statement we all make at one time or another: "I love You."
--Auden's poem, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," underscores a fundamental fact about his poetry: he had thought through and gained command over virtually every dimension of human experience.
--Auden was not afraid to write biting verse about contemporary issues while preserving poetic distance and form (not giving in to shocking ranting, for example.)
--Auden's classical frame of reference could be challenging, but he still managed to write more directly and clearly than T.S. Eliot, whose mantle he was thought to have donned upon Eliot's departure from the scene.
--Auden managed to be intelligent in virtually every line he wrote; the connective tissue between his perceptions was his gift for analysis and valuation.
--Auden both embraced and transcended his homosexuality, normalizing the facts and truths.
II. Why You Should Not Read Auden
--Auden's been dead a long time now, so who cares?
--Poetic forms have been dead for a long time now, so who cares?
--Any poet who is ironically passionate about his passions isn't passionate enough to be passionate about.
--A poet who doesn't serve up the same stuff all the time cannot be trusted--did Auden ever have a thought he didn't transform into a line of poetry?
--Auden wasn't really the heir to Eliot, and he'd say so himself, challenging the notion of heirs altogether.
--Who has time for poetry that has a consistently gentle Olympian quality to it? I mean, who knows who Aphrodite and Achilles were? And again, who cares? Talk about dead, they were never even alive!
--Auden might have been gay, but he still was a male WASP who spent a lot of time at Oxford.
--Philip Larkin, the most overrated of English poets, has made perfectly clear that he thought Auden was overrated.
--Where did Auden come up with this Dictung und Warheit idea anyway? Who was Goethe? How do you even pronounce a name spelled like that?
--And he didn't stop at memorializing Sigmund Freud, he carried on about Henry James, as well. Something about his "heart, fastidious as a delicate nun..." What's that supposed to mean?
June 20, 2018
I can't even remember how I ended up reserving this book from the library and I don't think I really knew who W.H. Auden was before this, and I definitely didnt realize I was getting 897 pages of poetry from the same guy, poems from 1927 until his death in 1973 that he wanted to preserve. So I got a very big introduction to Auden...
I feel like the Auden, maybe beginning around "Age of Anxiety" era, got more enigmatic with his poetry after that and uses obscure words, and it is clear from his poetry that he is very well-read and a lot of his poetry is intertextual, reacting to or referencing literature and scholars/poets/authors. His main two sources are Christianity, Anglican specifically I believe, and Greek mythology. As for the poetry itself, i'd say its rather austere and there's not a lot of visceral or physical imagery, it almost seems like meditations or observation. "In Praise of Limestone" I think is a good example, I don't think the imagery gets as out there as say surrealist poets and it doesn't seem as obscure as The Waste Land, but the meaning to it to me is pretty much impenetrable. Reading it out loud feels like reading a kind of mundane sentence but you have idea what you're saying - interesting experience.
There were two main things I didn't really like:
1. As a result of his style a lot of the poems in here are forgettable to me, all the long ones that take up full "parts" of the book I think are good (I didn't really like part 3 to sea and the mirror because it felt like a slog to read , also maybe I need to read Shakespeare first, I really don't know) and the book in general, being so long and a lot of poems being forgettable, felt like a slog, almost like a chore to read at times, even though the poetry I don't think was ever bad.
2. he implicitly says stalin and hitler were the same twice in gigantic tome of poetry. cmon man! oh well octavio paz has a whole poem about hating stalin that I thought was aesthetically good.
Overall I would say I enjoy Auden's poetry but I probably would have rather read a "selected" than "collected".
I feel like the Auden, maybe beginning around "Age of Anxiety" era, got more enigmatic with his poetry after that and uses obscure words, and it is clear from his poetry that he is very well-read and a lot of his poetry is intertextual, reacting to or referencing literature and scholars/poets/authors. His main two sources are Christianity, Anglican specifically I believe, and Greek mythology. As for the poetry itself, i'd say its rather austere and there's not a lot of visceral or physical imagery, it almost seems like meditations or observation. "In Praise of Limestone" I think is a good example, I don't think the imagery gets as out there as say surrealist poets and it doesn't seem as obscure as The Waste Land, but the meaning to it to me is pretty much impenetrable. Reading it out loud feels like reading a kind of mundane sentence but you have idea what you're saying - interesting experience.
There were two main things I didn't really like:
1. As a result of his style a lot of the poems in here are forgettable to me, all the long ones that take up full "parts" of the book I think are good (I didn't really like part 3 to sea and the mirror because it felt like a slog to read , also maybe I need to read Shakespeare first, I really don't know) and the book in general, being so long and a lot of poems being forgettable, felt like a slog, almost like a chore to read at times, even though the poetry I don't think was ever bad.
2. he implicitly says stalin and hitler were the same twice in gigantic tome of poetry. cmon man! oh well octavio paz has a whole poem about hating stalin that I thought was aesthetically good.
Overall I would say I enjoy Auden's poetry but I probably would have rather read a "selected" than "collected".
May 16, 2013
Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
June 15, 2007
Auden tends to either hit the mark with great skill, or be totally off base.
It's nice to have the whole collection of poems, but there are a lot of totally forgettable ones in here.
However, some of his work is so starkly and utterly beautiful, this is a collection I'll always want to have with me.
"Lullaby" alone makes this a treasured book.
It's nice to have the whole collection of poems, but there are a lot of totally forgettable ones in here.
However, some of his work is so starkly and utterly beautiful, this is a collection I'll always want to have with me.
"Lullaby" alone makes this a treasured book.
October 22, 2009
There are many poems in here I have yet to mine, but this collection has kept me company on many cold nights when all I want to do is curl up with some words, some wine, and my own thoughts. Tough to beat.
October 1, 2012
I dipped back into the old Auden collection this week. Wow, still blown away. He's our bridge from the Romantic to the Modern. Formally flawless in so many poems, always stimulating intellectually, even when he misses the mark. I favour the earlier poems, but find beauty throughout.
January 2, 2010
I don't usually read poetry anymore, but when I want to this is definitely the book I turn to.
March 20, 2022
A huge collection of Auden's work, 900 pages of poems. Like anything, you can't love everything and I wouldn't say I completely love Auden's style but there is A lot to pick and choose from in this book and A lot to like.
Highlights from Part 2: ~ "Taller To-day" "Let History Be My Judge" "Too Dear, Too Vague" "1929" " The Bonfires" "The Question" "The Wanderer" "Adolescence" "The Exiles" "Ode" "Legend".
Highlight from Part 3: ~ "Letter to Lord Byron".
Highlights from Part 4: ~ "A Summer Night" "Paysage Moralise" "O What is that Sound" "Through the Looking Glass" "A Misunderstanding" "Who's Who" "On this Island" "Nightmail" "As I Walked Out One Morning" " Twelve Songs" "Casino" "Death's Echo" "As He Is" "Musee Des Beaux Arts" "Edward Lear" and "Epitaph on a Tyrant".
Highlight from Part 5 : ~ "New Year Letter".
Highlights from Part 6: ~ "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" "Voltaire at Ferney" "Herman Melville" "The Unknown Citizen" "The Riddle" "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" "Our Bias" "Hell" "At the Grave of Henry James" "Canzone" and "A Walk After Dark".
Highlights from Part 7 : ~ "For the Time Being"
Highlights from Part 8 : ~ "The Sea and the Mirror"
Highlights from Part 10 : ~ "In Transit" "In Praise of Limestone" "Under Sirius" "An Island Cemetery" "Nocturne" "The Shield of Achilles" "There Will Be No Peace" and "Horse Canonicae".
Highlights from Part 11 : ~ "Dichtung Und Wahrheit".
Highlights from Part 12 : ~ "Reflections in a Forest" "Hands" "Walks" "Friday's Child" "Academic Graffiti" "Hammerfest" "At the Party" "Fairground" "River Profile" "Circe" and "Talking to Dogs".
Highlights from Part 13 : ~ "Lullaby" "Aubade" "Thank you, Fog" "No, Plato, No" "Address to the Beasts" and "Archaeology".
Highlights from Part 2: ~ "Taller To-day" "Let History Be My Judge" "Too Dear, Too Vague" "1929" " The Bonfires" "The Question" "The Wanderer" "Adolescence" "The Exiles" "Ode" "Legend".
Highlight from Part 3: ~ "Letter to Lord Byron".
Highlights from Part 4: ~ "A Summer Night" "Paysage Moralise" "O What is that Sound" "Through the Looking Glass" "A Misunderstanding" "Who's Who" "On this Island" "Nightmail" "As I Walked Out One Morning" " Twelve Songs" "Casino" "Death's Echo" "As He Is" "Musee Des Beaux Arts" "Edward Lear" and "Epitaph on a Tyrant".
Highlight from Part 5 : ~ "New Year Letter".
Highlights from Part 6: ~ "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" "Voltaire at Ferney" "Herman Melville" "The Unknown Citizen" "The Riddle" "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" "Our Bias" "Hell" "At the Grave of Henry James" "Canzone" and "A Walk After Dark".
Highlights from Part 7 : ~ "For the Time Being"
Highlights from Part 8 : ~ "The Sea and the Mirror"
Highlights from Part 10 : ~ "In Transit" "In Praise of Limestone" "Under Sirius" "An Island Cemetery" "Nocturne" "The Shield of Achilles" "There Will Be No Peace" and "Horse Canonicae".
Highlights from Part 11 : ~ "Dichtung Und Wahrheit".
Highlights from Part 12 : ~ "Reflections in a Forest" "Hands" "Walks" "Friday's Child" "Academic Graffiti" "Hammerfest" "At the Party" "Fairground" "River Profile" "Circe" and "Talking to Dogs".
Highlights from Part 13 : ~ "Lullaby" "Aubade" "Thank you, Fog" "No, Plato, No" "Address to the Beasts" and "Archaeology".
April 10, 2022
Auden is the very first poet I fell in love with. Circa 2006, I carried around "Funeral Blues" in my pocket for Poem in My Pocket Day. It was easy for me to appreciate the depth of loss in his words. This was either the year or the year following the death of my maternal grandmother. The fact that fifth-grader me could resonate as profoundly as twenty-eight-year-old me can is a resounding testament to the success of Auden's anti-elitist approach and legacy.
October 30, 2019
Forever one of my favourites. I frequently revisit this collection, as well as the Christopher Isherwood biography. Auden is a remarkably talented spirit. Glad this is as thick as it is.
November 6, 2022
Confession: I don't really know how to read poetry.
March 27, 2019
I found Auden's poetry a mess. Obviously, his poetry is often of the highest quality and includes some universally loved poems. Even lesser work is freqeuntly of great interest and worth reading. But his so called Collected Poems is not only a mere selection, leaving out some work that really is essential (like The Orators, which I bought as a separate volume before finding again it in The English Auden), and arranged by Auden himself in an entirely unhelpful way, but also includes alterations to many poems by Auden himself that are neither an improvement nor of sufficient interest to want to kept track of them; they just annoyed me.
Much more interesting is to work with The English Auden, a different collection by Edward Mendelson, which conforms to the order of writing and is grouped correctly into the volumes as published, preserves the earlier and more attractive versions of the poems, and loses litle by being limited to the years 1927 - 1939. It also gathers a selection of Auden's prose writing and that is interesting too. For anyone who can absorb all this material, then good luck with the remainder in the Collected Poems. Once I found it, I just confined my attention to this collection.
When reading alongside a biography, which I like to do, it is really only worthwhile to use The English Auden. The particular biography I chose (there are a number I know) was not sufficiently detailed since much of Auden's poetry is frankly obscure, so I also turned to W H Auden - A Commentary by John Fuller as a valuable refrence source for each and every poem. This supplied some fascinating red herrings and side alleys to explore, though it is excessive for anyone who does not intend to spend serious time on Auden's work.
Just for comparison, my ideal poetry collection was one for Seamus Heaney, and came in the form of a boxed set of every book he published , each in its orginal form. It was possible to follow Heaney's writing career in a convenient, accessible way that, bluntly, is a huge contrast to the unwieldy, confusing and often tiresome effort of searching out the relevant Auden poems alongside
supporting reference materials. With Heaney I could slip each volume in turn into a coat pocket and carry it around with me. With Auden I needed a wheelbarrow to move from one room to another.
After all that I am not even much of a fan.
Much more interesting is to work with The English Auden, a different collection by Edward Mendelson, which conforms to the order of writing and is grouped correctly into the volumes as published, preserves the earlier and more attractive versions of the poems, and loses litle by being limited to the years 1927 - 1939. It also gathers a selection of Auden's prose writing and that is interesting too. For anyone who can absorb all this material, then good luck with the remainder in the Collected Poems. Once I found it, I just confined my attention to this collection.
When reading alongside a biography, which I like to do, it is really only worthwhile to use The English Auden. The particular biography I chose (there are a number I know) was not sufficiently detailed since much of Auden's poetry is frankly obscure, so I also turned to W H Auden - A Commentary by John Fuller as a valuable refrence source for each and every poem. This supplied some fascinating red herrings and side alleys to explore, though it is excessive for anyone who does not intend to spend serious time on Auden's work.
Just for comparison, my ideal poetry collection was one for Seamus Heaney, and came in the form of a boxed set of every book he published , each in its orginal form. It was possible to follow Heaney's writing career in a convenient, accessible way that, bluntly, is a huge contrast to the unwieldy, confusing and often tiresome effort of searching out the relevant Auden poems alongside
supporting reference materials. With Heaney I could slip each volume in turn into a coat pocket and carry it around with me. With Auden I needed a wheelbarrow to move from one room to another.
After all that I am not even much of a fan.
December 8, 2021
I do not like this man or his poems. This volume has the trappings of a 'complete poems', but in fact reflects an old-age decision to exclude many of his most popular poems (including the relatively good 'September 1 1939') and to diminish many of the rest by adding contradictory titles or making very artificial changes. I've seen many favorable references to Auden that made me think this (900 page) tome would be a great time, but it instead turned into an irresolvable and almost surreal misery as I struggled to answer basic questions such as 'who would enjoy this' or 'why did he think this was worth writing'.
People generally class him as an iconoclast and among the greats of the Modernists, Yeats and Eliot, which is very interesting as Auden is essentially an extremely myopic poet and a monotonic imitator of Eliot. Auden begins with the basic Prufrock-era formula, slightly off-beat variations of British high-culture sentimentalism, modified with an extra bit of self-consciousness to make clear the speaker's incapability to surmount reality via poetry. Later on, once Eliot wrote it for Auden to mimic, he also began writing poems in the vein of Ash Wednesday, advancements of the earlier aesthetic amplified with directer language and greater scope; but, believing in nothing and understanding less, the infiltration of existential woes comes off like a teenager's eisegeses of Camus, and the milquetoast-liberal political diatribes writhe desperately in attempts to come up with a catch-phrase like "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper", failing over and over. Typed out like this it seems fairly complex, but in reality it reduces to undiscerningly regurgitated sentimentalisms with only the slightest and least subtle layer of pensive irony. At times he achieves interesting effects in experimental forms, but they're always traceable to a source (often done much earlier and actually profoundly), such as his dulled prosodic adventures in the vein of Hopkins or observational syllabic stanzas in the style of Marianne Moore (poems which, by the way, come off as some of his worst by comparison to the master). The folk-song rhythms get grating after three of the 500 times he uses them, and his insistence on using some disgusting variation on feminine rhymes (eg, he rhymes "people" with "the dull") is infuriating, not least because of his failed attempt to use them as a creative subversion of poetry a la Cummings. In old age, his style relaxed and, seemingly by forty, he embraced being an 'august figure' of poetry, writing lazy and unbelievably banal reflections on thoughtless topics, apparently imagining himself as a gravitas-wielding elder whose every word gleaned with profundity - a profundity he never had as a youth, never earned, and likely never appreciated in the works of more competent others. In his oldest years this grew radically worse, which makes even the effort to sit down and finish reading this an almost masochistic affair.
He attempts longer forms, but fails even more miserably; "Letter to Lord Byron" sees him spewing platitude after platitude in attempt at 'historical reflection'; "New Year Letter" sees him writing awkward couplets about Heidegger (whom he clearly doesn't understand) and the tragedy of the war (which deserved vastly better than "let's get world war 2 done / because it's no fun"[paraphrase as I don't want to backtrack]); "For The Time Being" and "The Sea and the Mirror" see him lazily rewriting the Gospels and The Tempest except with monologuing British morons, and "Age of Anxiety" is an even worse attempt at a Pynchon-like war fable. Reading this, you might reflect that I've missed the irony of his substitution of turgid Anglo-isms for serious topics, but if you read them yourself you'd see that the intended irony doesn't hold: the existential self-awareness he ironically loads onto the style serves primarily as a hyper-glorification of that banality, and is executed any-how without any evident awareness of culture, psychology or really anything at all; moreover he himself clearly wished to write on serious subjects with weight but very clearly had no ability to write in anything other than a slightly distorted version of perhaps the ugliest dictum of all time, Londonite moralizing . . . . also present is a rather uninteresting early play with a more abrasively non-real style, and an 'unwritten poem' that passes as a very unstudious attempt at summarizing Martin Buber.
To his credit, there are a few good poems. His 'Elegy to Yeats' is alright although essentially just a less offensive version of his usual style; a few poems of his youth like 'Danse Macabre' have at least abstract concerns more appropriate to his distorted dictum; his Marianne Moore imitations reached a tolerable peak with poems like 'In Praise of Limestone'. I would estimate that if I went back and tried to make an acceptable collection out of these poems I would run out after about 20 or 25 pages.
I would have dropped the book had I not had some latent hope that the above qualities would perhaps at some point win out over the mediocrities; as that didn't happen, it became more a puzzle of trying to figure out the appeal. Knowing the follies of the foolish, especially the Anglo-Saxons, we can presume the narcissistic joy or what have you kept Auden going; as for his audience, it seems that his initial appeal was to the mid-wits of the English and perhaps some American readers during the 30s and 40s, banalities dressed up with the easiest and least challenging of weights. The lasting nature of his appeal, I would say, comes from pragmatic purposes - Yeats is inimitable, Eliot is inimitable, but Auden is eminently imitable, especially if you're an academic or rich fart of middling intelligence but a burning desire to dress up your banalities in a 'poetical' way; and it's unclear to me whether Auden would have been bothered by the inevitable sea of mediocrity that followed him (or if he'd even have seen his own mediocrity in others). Most interesting to me is the great Ashbery's insistence on the greatness&influence of Auden. Indeed, it seems to me that the surrealization of sentimental platitudes is the obvious link, with the comic irony that Ashbery was not only able to do it MUCH better, but also that by eschewing Auden's hysterical need for profundity, and exchanging it for deliberate nonsense, Ashbery's verse turned out vastly more coherent than Auden's desperation for something to say.
In all I would not recommend reading this or befriending fans of this book.
People generally class him as an iconoclast and among the greats of the Modernists, Yeats and Eliot, which is very interesting as Auden is essentially an extremely myopic poet and a monotonic imitator of Eliot. Auden begins with the basic Prufrock-era formula, slightly off-beat variations of British high-culture sentimentalism, modified with an extra bit of self-consciousness to make clear the speaker's incapability to surmount reality via poetry. Later on, once Eliot wrote it for Auden to mimic, he also began writing poems in the vein of Ash Wednesday, advancements of the earlier aesthetic amplified with directer language and greater scope; but, believing in nothing and understanding less, the infiltration of existential woes comes off like a teenager's eisegeses of Camus, and the milquetoast-liberal political diatribes writhe desperately in attempts to come up with a catch-phrase like "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper", failing over and over. Typed out like this it seems fairly complex, but in reality it reduces to undiscerningly regurgitated sentimentalisms with only the slightest and least subtle layer of pensive irony. At times he achieves interesting effects in experimental forms, but they're always traceable to a source (often done much earlier and actually profoundly), such as his dulled prosodic adventures in the vein of Hopkins or observational syllabic stanzas in the style of Marianne Moore (poems which, by the way, come off as some of his worst by comparison to the master). The folk-song rhythms get grating after three of the 500 times he uses them, and his insistence on using some disgusting variation on feminine rhymes (eg, he rhymes "people" with "the dull") is infuriating, not least because of his failed attempt to use them as a creative subversion of poetry a la Cummings. In old age, his style relaxed and, seemingly by forty, he embraced being an 'august figure' of poetry, writing lazy and unbelievably banal reflections on thoughtless topics, apparently imagining himself as a gravitas-wielding elder whose every word gleaned with profundity - a profundity he never had as a youth, never earned, and likely never appreciated in the works of more competent others. In his oldest years this grew radically worse, which makes even the effort to sit down and finish reading this an almost masochistic affair.
He attempts longer forms, but fails even more miserably; "Letter to Lord Byron" sees him spewing platitude after platitude in attempt at 'historical reflection'; "New Year Letter" sees him writing awkward couplets about Heidegger (whom he clearly doesn't understand) and the tragedy of the war (which deserved vastly better than "let's get world war 2 done / because it's no fun"[paraphrase as I don't want to backtrack]); "For The Time Being" and "The Sea and the Mirror" see him lazily rewriting the Gospels and The Tempest except with monologuing British morons, and "Age of Anxiety" is an even worse attempt at a Pynchon-like war fable. Reading this, you might reflect that I've missed the irony of his substitution of turgid Anglo-isms for serious topics, but if you read them yourself you'd see that the intended irony doesn't hold: the existential self-awareness he ironically loads onto the style serves primarily as a hyper-glorification of that banality, and is executed any-how without any evident awareness of culture, psychology or really anything at all; moreover he himself clearly wished to write on serious subjects with weight but very clearly had no ability to write in anything other than a slightly distorted version of perhaps the ugliest dictum of all time, Londonite moralizing . . . . also present is a rather uninteresting early play with a more abrasively non-real style, and an 'unwritten poem' that passes as a very unstudious attempt at summarizing Martin Buber.
To his credit, there are a few good poems. His 'Elegy to Yeats' is alright although essentially just a less offensive version of his usual style; a few poems of his youth like 'Danse Macabre' have at least abstract concerns more appropriate to his distorted dictum; his Marianne Moore imitations reached a tolerable peak with poems like 'In Praise of Limestone'. I would estimate that if I went back and tried to make an acceptable collection out of these poems I would run out after about 20 or 25 pages.
I would have dropped the book had I not had some latent hope that the above qualities would perhaps at some point win out over the mediocrities; as that didn't happen, it became more a puzzle of trying to figure out the appeal. Knowing the follies of the foolish, especially the Anglo-Saxons, we can presume the narcissistic joy or what have you kept Auden going; as for his audience, it seems that his initial appeal was to the mid-wits of the English and perhaps some American readers during the 30s and 40s, banalities dressed up with the easiest and least challenging of weights. The lasting nature of his appeal, I would say, comes from pragmatic purposes - Yeats is inimitable, Eliot is inimitable, but Auden is eminently imitable, especially if you're an academic or rich fart of middling intelligence but a burning desire to dress up your banalities in a 'poetical' way; and it's unclear to me whether Auden would have been bothered by the inevitable sea of mediocrity that followed him (or if he'd even have seen his own mediocrity in others). Most interesting to me is the great Ashbery's insistence on the greatness&influence of Auden. Indeed, it seems to me that the surrealization of sentimental platitudes is the obvious link, with the comic irony that Ashbery was not only able to do it MUCH better, but also that by eschewing Auden's hysterical need for profundity, and exchanging it for deliberate nonsense, Ashbery's verse turned out vastly more coherent than Auden's desperation for something to say.
In all I would not recommend reading this or befriending fans of this book.
Want to read
March 13, 2013Having read an autobigraphy, interspersed with poetry, of Auden by Charles Osborne, I think I have a better understanding, holistically, of the man and his writing. Auden used his wayward intellect to create a flippant, yet cleverly contrived personal style, with witticisms of the cartoonish kind, and bon mots, to be applauded like a theatrical event, similar to his many collaborations with Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten.
He was sometimes outrageously gay, and belonged to an Oxford group which included Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender.
In the thirties he, like Spender, had left leanings, but later became disenchanted and veered to the right. Like Evelyn Waugh, he returned to religion, in his case the Church of England, which he had abandoned while at Oxford.
With Isherwood, he became a resident, and later a citizen, of the United States.
For this he was considered to be a traitor by some, for escaping from England during its hour of need - just prior to World War 2.
In the US he lectured at a number of Universities and gave poetry readings. Later, he and a much younger lover, Chester Kallman, wrote for the theatre and lived just outside Vienna in the Austrian countryside for six months of every year. The other six were spent in Greenwich Village, New York, where they had a flat.
During the last years of his life, Auden returned to Oxord, where he was provided with a cottage for a nominal rent. He was aheavy drinker and ultimately died alone of a heart attack in a hotel room.
He was sometimes outrageously gay, and belonged to an Oxford group which included Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender.
In the thirties he, like Spender, had left leanings, but later became disenchanted and veered to the right. Like Evelyn Waugh, he returned to religion, in his case the Church of England, which he had abandoned while at Oxford.
With Isherwood, he became a resident, and later a citizen, of the United States.
For this he was considered to be a traitor by some, for escaping from England during its hour of need - just prior to World War 2.
In the US he lectured at a number of Universities and gave poetry readings. Later, he and a much younger lover, Chester Kallman, wrote for the theatre and lived just outside Vienna in the Austrian countryside for six months of every year. The other six were spent in Greenwich Village, New York, where they had a flat.
During the last years of his life, Auden returned to Oxord, where he was provided with a cottage for a nominal rent. He was aheavy drinker and ultimately died alone of a heart attack in a hotel room.
June 20, 2015
Auden famously stated that "poetry makes nothing happen", which could be read or humility or a defense of art for art's sake. The latter makes more sense, as Auden was clearly hoping for a place in the lineage of his poetic antecedents, and a permanent home in the canon. And while he wrote big, important poems, his most direct influences were from those slightly older poets - Eliot and Yeats - who were concerned with creating a connection between personal faith and the decline of Western civilization.
Auden was writing poetry through the rise of fascism and Stalinism, along with the global trauma of World War 2, but he makes scant and oblique references to world events. He was more concerned with the personal and how it interacted with culture. While he ambitiously tried his hand at many different poetic forms, he most commonly can be seen in the mode of contemporaries like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, only with a more British kind of emotional reserve, and a sharp sense of cultural context.
The last stanzas of "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" contradict Auden's belief in the limited power of poetry:
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Does Auden think that poetry save humanity? Or his he lauding the generous spirit of the artist?
Auden was writing poetry through the rise of fascism and Stalinism, along with the global trauma of World War 2, but he makes scant and oblique references to world events. He was more concerned with the personal and how it interacted with culture. While he ambitiously tried his hand at many different poetic forms, he most commonly can be seen in the mode of contemporaries like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, only with a more British kind of emotional reserve, and a sharp sense of cultural context.
The last stanzas of "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" contradict Auden's belief in the limited power of poetry:
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Does Auden think that poetry save humanity? Or his he lauding the generous spirit of the artist?
September 11, 2018
W.H. Auden was a prolific writer/poet! The Collected Works is huge to the point of being difficult to manage for a relaxing read. But that is my only negative comment.
I was first introduced to Auden's poetry when reading a fiction book that often quoted him. Usually his quotes are the ones perfect for a poster or framed inspirations.
I've just GOT to mention a few of my favorites:
"We are here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know."
"My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth."
"Nobody is ever sent to Hell; he or she insists on going there."
"No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him."
"I'll love you till the ocean is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking like geese about the sky."
"A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep."
I was first introduced to Auden's poetry when reading a fiction book that often quoted him. Usually his quotes are the ones perfect for a poster or framed inspirations.
I've just GOT to mention a few of my favorites:
"We are here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know."
"My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth."
"Nobody is ever sent to Hell; he or she insists on going there."
"No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him."
"I'll love you till the ocean is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking like geese about the sky."
"A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep."
November 27, 2017
I've never really gotten the Auden thing. He's good, but a lot of guys are good. It seems like he gets more air time, as it were, than most comparable talents.
Reading this mammoth book kind of confirmed my opinion, while at the same time jarring it once in a while: every time I was tempted to skip ahead--and this was often--I would hit a line or a whole segment of a poem that gave me shivers. You kind of get tired of the tone of the early poems, and the more relaxed later ones don't have the same pop. But still, he's written a few that deserve to be in your working memory ("Shield of Achilles," "The Fall of Icarus," "In Memory of W.B. Yeats") and a bunch more which are worth puzzling over.
I find the "Shorts" the most fun. There is something significant in the following:
His thoughts pottered
from verses to sex to God
without punctuation.
Reading this mammoth book kind of confirmed my opinion, while at the same time jarring it once in a while: every time I was tempted to skip ahead--and this was often--I would hit a line or a whole segment of a poem that gave me shivers. You kind of get tired of the tone of the early poems, and the more relaxed later ones don't have the same pop. But still, he's written a few that deserve to be in your working memory ("Shield of Achilles," "The Fall of Icarus," "In Memory of W.B. Yeats") and a bunch more which are worth puzzling over.
I find the "Shorts" the most fun. There is something significant in the following:
His thoughts pottered
from verses to sex to God
without punctuation.
August 14, 2019
Still reading this, I will probably continue to read it for the rest of my life.
It's farewell to the drawing-room's mannerly cry,
The professor's logical whereto and why,
The frock-coated diplomat's polished aplomb,
Now matters are settled with gas and with bomb....
It's farewell to the drawing-room's mannerly cry,
The professor's logical whereto and why,
The frock-coated diplomat's polished aplomb,
Now matters are settled with gas and with bomb....
August 1, 2012
Sometimes clear as a bell. Sometimes I'm lost. But lots of it really sends my mind off in new directions. Wonderful! It's worth it to read his Christmas poem/play "for the time being."
July 1, 2017
"Our tables and chairs and sofas
Know things about us
Our lovers can't."
"In moments of joy
all of us wished we possessed
a tail we could wag."
Know things about us
Our lovers can't."
"In moments of joy
all of us wished we possessed
a tail we could wag."
Displaying 1 - 30 of 97 reviews