Pingback: Poem: “Post-Adult” | Form in Formless Times If you buy a copy of this book, make sure it has the 120 poems! Unfortunately I only have the 100-poem version. Newly included are such favorites as “Funeral Blues” and other works that represent Auden’s lighter, comic side”. A more recent edition adds another 20 poems, “broadening its focus to better reflect the enormous wealth of form, rhetoric, tone, and content in Auden’s work. The first edition of “Selected Poems” (selected and edited by Edward Mendelson) contains 100 poems. This preference was expressed at the time that he was rewriting the excellent poems of his youth to reflect his newer American, Christian, self-important academic personality. Apparently Auden preferred this prose section, “Caliban to the Audience”, over all his other work. Halfway through the book you run into the poem sequence “The Sea and the Mirror – a commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest”, which includes 25 pages of prose crammed with dense imagery and argument. It is therefore somewhat depressing to read these “Selected Poems” because they are set out chronologically, and the writing gets less interesting the further you read. He lived to age 66, writing longer and longer works, moving further and further away from traditional verse, and with less of the memorable genius of his youth. It provides an unexpected strength for his verse.Īnd yet, and yet… all of those poems listed above were written before he turned 33. This is in keeping with the fact that he was gay, and writing in a time when homosexuality was illegal. There is a universality about Auden’s depiction of relationships, an indeterminate quality that allows his thoughts to be applied to all people. O what is that sound that so thrills the earĪ shilling life will give you all the factsĪnd what many consider the greatest love-poem of the last 100 years: “O where are you going?” said reader to rider

The best of Auden’s poems are so many, so varied, so technically accomplished and so witty that he stands with the greatest poets of the 20th century.

Wh auden selected poems