Collected Poems of W. H. Auden

ASTONISHING: PROFOUND: INVENTIVE: INFUSED WITH LOVE: FINE virtually AS-NEW First Trade Paperback Edition (Orig. February 1991) Later Printing: FINE virtually AS-NEW matte-laminated card-stock cover w/ EXCELLENT edges & corners & w/ striking gray-scale photo-portrait of Auden on front panel, EXCELLENT unmarked smooth-cut text block exterior, FINE virtually AS-NEW perfect binding w/ slightest creasing of spine, PRISTINE interior handsomely printed on EXCELLENT unblemished archival paper * 5.24" x 8.00" x 2.00", 0.90 kg, xxxii+928 (960) pp * ABOUT THE BOOK: Between 1927 & his death in 1973, W.H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language w/ a new face. Or rather, w/ 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 w/ all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice & the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, & his ability to recast those traditions in modern times. Auden divided his poems into sections that corresponded to what he referred to as chapters in his life, each one beginning with a change in his inner life or external circumstances: the moment in 1933 when he first knew "exactly what it means to "love one's neighbor as oneself"; his move from Britain to America in 1939; his first summer in Italy in 1948; his move to a summerhouse in Austria in 1958; & his return to England in 1972. Auden's work has perhaps the widest range & the greatest depth of any English poet of the past 300 years. From the anxious warnings of his early verse through the expansive historical perspectives of his middle years to the celebrations & thanksgiving in his later work, Auden wrote in a voice that addressed readers personally rather than as part of a collective audience. His styles & forms extend from ballads & songs to haiku & limericks to sonnets, sestinas, prose poems, & dozens of other constructions of his own invention. His tone ranges from spirited comedy to memorable profundity: often within the same work. His poems manage to be secular & sacred, philosophical & erotic, personal & universal. "All the poems I have written were written for love," Auden once said. This book includes his famous early poems about transient love ("Lay your sleeping head, my love", "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone") & his later poems about enduring love ("In Sickness and in Health", "First Things First"). The book also includes Auden's longer, more thematically varied poems, from the expressionist charade "Paid on Both Sides" to the formal couplets of "New Year Letter"; the darkly comic sequel to The Tempest, "The Sea and the Mirror"; & a baroque eclogue set in a wartime bar, "The Age of Anxiety". This edition includes an introduction by Edward Mendelson, the editor of the present volume & Auden's literary executor. * HIGHEST PRAISE: "W.H. Auden had the greatest gifts of any of our poets in the 20th century." -James Fenton, NYRB. "At the beginning of the new century, [Auden] is an indispensable poet. Even people who don't read poems often turn to poetry at moments when it matters, & Auden matters now". -Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker * SHIPPING: MNEMOSYNE carefully wraps, labels & custom-packages this fine book for FREE domestic shipment via USPS MEDIA MAIL or USPS PRIORITY MAIL for anl additional fee & via efficient USPS FIRST CLASS MAIL to all international shipments at our posted rates.…