W.H. Auden

W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907, and brought up in Birmingham. He went to Christ Church College, Oxford, where Stephen Spender privately printed a booklet of his poems. After university he lived for a time in Berlin, before returning to England to teach. His first book, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber in 1930. Other volumes of poems and plays followed during the 1930s. 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.

Books by W.H. Auden

Collected Longer Poems

W. H. Auden

First published in 1968, this companion volume to Collected Shorter Poems was compiled by W. H. Auden and brings together six of his longer poetic works, published originally between 1930 ...

Nineteenth-Century Minor Poets

Edited by W. H. Auden

Who is a major, who is a minor poet? Inevitably, in his introduction, W. H. Auden offers a stimulating rationale for distinguishing between the two. To paraphrase him, one cannot ...

Selected Poems

W. H. Auden

Edward Mendelson has significantly expanded his authoritative, chronological ordered edition of Auden’s Selected Poems (first published in 1979), adding twenty items to the hundred in the original edition, and ...

The Selected Writings of Sydney Smith

Edited by W. H. Auden

'He is a very clever fellow, but he will never be a bishop.' George III

'A more profligate parson I never met.' George IV

'I sat next to Sydney Smith ...

W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden (1907-73) came to prominence in the 1930s among a generation of outspoken poets that included his friends Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. But he was ...

W. H. Auden Prose Volume 3 (1949-1955)

Edward Mendelson

This is the fifth volume to be published in the ongoing complete edition of Auden's works, under the editorship of Edward Mendelson. It includes the essays, reviews, and other ...

Collected Poems

W. H. Auden

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 ...

Another Time

W. H. Auden

'[He] has made himself into a kind of unofficial poet laureate. If I am bombed I hope he will write a few sapphics about me.' Stephen Spender, 1941

Another Time ...

Collected Auden

W. H. Auden

Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957

W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden was once described as the Picasso of modern poetry - a tribute to his ceaseless experimentation with form and subject matter. Beginning with Anglo-Saxon poetry and ending with ...

Letters from Iceland

W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice

This highly amusing and unorthodox travel book resulted from a light-hearted summer journey by the young poets Auden and MacNeice in 1936. Their letters home, in verse and prose, are ...

Journey to a War

W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood

Look, Stranger!

W. H. Auden

As I Walked Out One Evening

W. H. Auden

The Dog Beneath the Skin

W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood

W. H. Auden Prose 1939-1948

W. H. Auden

This is the fourth volume in a complete edition of Auden's works, following Plays, Libretti and Prose Volume I - 1926-1938 . The collection of 580 pages includes the essays, reviews ...