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W. H. Auden called opera the "last refuge of the High Style," and considered it the one art in which the grand manner survived the ironic levelings of modernity. He began writing libretti soon after he arrived in America in 1939 and abandoned his earlier attempts to write public, political drama. Opera gave him the opportunity to rise to the high style in public, not in an attempt to elevate his own status as a poet, but in service of the heroic voice of the singers. These works present their mythical actions with a direct intensity unlike anything in even his greatest poems. In this volume of Auden and Chester Kallman's libretti, extensive historical and textual notes trace the history of the production and revision of the works and provide full texts of early scenarios, as well as abandoned and rewritten scenes.

Almost all the works included here were previously published in incomplete and often inaccessible editions--or were never published at all. The book prints for the first time the full text of Paul Bunyan, Auden's first libretto, which he wrote for music by Benjamin Britten. It also includes Auden and Kallman's The Rake's Progress, written for Igor Stravinsky, and Delia, written for Stravinsky but never set to music. The book continues with Auden and Kallman's two libretti written for music by Hans Werner Henze, Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids, and their adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost, composed by Nicolas Nabokov. It also contains their translation of The Magic Flute, with its scenes reordered for greater dramatic coherence and added dialogue for sharper mythical significance, and their antimasque, The Entertainment of the Senses, for music by John Gardner.

The book contains two radio plays--The Dark Valley, a monologue written by Auden alone, and The Rocking Horse Winner, written with James Stern and based on a story by D. H. Lawrence. Also included are the unpublished masque that Auden wrote for Kallman's twenty-second birthday, the unpublished versions of The Dutchess of Malfi that Auden prepared with Bertolt Brecht, scenarios for a film script and a libretto that were never completed, Auden's narrative for the medieval Play of Daniel, two narratives for documentary films, and his song lyrics written for Man of La Mancha before the producer decided to use a different lyricist. ... Read more

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Wystan and Those Who Knew Him
When W. H. Auden left England for the United States in 1939, he created a permanent divide in his identity and critical reception.An analogy is often drawn between his years spent on different continents and the craggy face that seemed to house rivers and tributaries.Perhaps the only legitimate rival of T. S. Eliot amongst twentieth-century English language poets, Auden's life was a tiring yet enlightened run of upheaval.

Had Auden not left England while on the verge of war against Germany, there is a vague possibility that he would have been nominated for British Poet Laureate.Though not one to compromise his art for the sake of production, Auden was a poet of remarkable skill and flexibility who could spin verse for any occasion.He was also a talent who could view the human experience from many different perspectives, as one comes to realize in this 1974 tribute volume edited by Stephen Spender.

'W. H. Auden: A Tribute' is a 255-page collection of essays that is both unsentimental and informative.For anyone who has cared to discover Auden the personality ('character' isn't far off a word), Spender's nicely-arranged volume leaves us feeling as if we were chums with this poet for years and knew him on an everyday basis.The tribute brings together various names who lived, worked, and collaborated with Auden during his 66 years on Earth, bringing out his gifts, eccentricities, and dedication to the craft of writing.

Spender, who met Auden at Oxford and privately distributed his first book of verse in 1928, knew the poet for his entire adult life and was highly qualified to serve as editor.The essays follow Auden's life chronologically, from when a middle-class child in Birmingham until the aging man who occupied his springs and summers in Kirchstetten, an Austrian town west of Vienna.Spender arranges these memoirs to reflect the psychological, artistic, and spiritual changes experienced by Auden over eight decades, although so multifaceted that they are impossible to summarize neatly.

Memories of his earlier years include those by John Auden, his elder brother who became a successful geologist; Rosamira Bulley, an instructor at St. Edmund's Preparatory School in Surrey; and John Betjeman, eventual Poet Laureate who knew Auden (to a degree) at Oxford.Perhaps most fascinating are memoirs from the 1930s, when Auden was at his physical and intellectual height.Here we find essays by painter William Coldstream, magazine editor Cyril Connolly, and longtime friend Michael Yates.It is the Yates memoir that is most inspiring of this book, a description of the famous 1936 trip to Iceland by Auden, Yates, and poet Louis MacNeice that resulted in 'Letters from Iceland.'The lengthy trip seems a microcosm of Auden's commitment to understanding, friendship, and community - the 'agape,' or universal love that he previously discovered.

Spender's volume makes an appropriate tone change as its essays begin dealing with the Auden of post-1939.It was during this stretch that Auden made his transition from pseudo-Marxism to Christianity, rejoining the Anglican Church in 1940.Anne Fremantle, a theological author, and Ursula Niebuhr, a fellow instructor at Barnard College, have written substantial essays on Auden's Christian beliefs.These are intriguingly offset by Second World War colleague James Stern, ballet organizer Lincoln Kirstein, composer Nicolas Nabokov, and Robert Craft, the long-time assistant of Igor Stravinsky.While never underestimating Auden's devotion to the Church, these other essays show his role as a man of the world and the worldly - a fellow who loved bawdy poems, vodka martinis, and outrageous (yet harmless) behavior.

The latter pages are rather dim, covering Auden's brief return to Oxford as a lecturer in 1972.While Auden continued to impress those he met, he was becoming further and further isolated as declining health set in and social traditions underwent their usual change.David Luke, a tutor of German at Oxford, supplies details of Auden having gone full circle in his intellectual life, age making him something of a curiosity piece amongst students and younger faculty.Spender reprints the valediction he gave at Auden's 1973 memorial service in Christ Church, shortly after an honorary burial in Kirchstetten.Topping off the volume are 100 photographs, including book covers and Auden's three sittings with Cecil Beaton.

The lasting impression that Spender's volume creates is one of a typically Piscean figure (he was born on February 21st) who seemed to bear many personalities at once: a devout Christian while shamelessly worldly; an impressive public figure while decidedly private; and a poet who despised war yet supported the Republican cause in Spain.He also registers as a man of humor and often painful wryness, someone you wouldn't mind chatting with about mankind's problems.Auden, however, was frequently more than talk, as shown by his marriage to Erika Mann, which secured the British passport that rescued her from Nazi persecution, and his efforts as a member of the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey after the Second World War had concluded in Europe.

For the most part, this is a strong tribute volume, although there could have been more substantial feedback from names like Christopher Isherwood (his essay is basically a reprint with postscript notes), Chester Kallman (just a poem written in 1970 with post-mortem stanzas added), and Leonard Bernstein, who for reasons unknown is not in this volume at all, despite basing his Symphony No. 2 on Auden's poem 'The Age of Anxiety.'The writing by certain figures is also lackadaisical and uses vague generalizations in trying to pin Auden down, but this is to be expected for a poet who was constantly changing in both views and temperament.

The tribute volume, first published by Macmillan in 1974, is a much-sought collector's item; if wanting to know Auden on sympathetic terms, this is probably the book to have.It is found in hardcover with a tricolor dust jacket, often at libraries, on the Internet, and in used bookstores.Several copies are available at the Strand Bookstore in New York City, where I was fortunate enough to pick mine up.And needless to say, Auden's poems, plays, and essays have their spot in the essential twentieth century canon.
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Containing all the essays and reviews that Auden wrote when he lived in England, this volume also includes the full original versions of his two travel books, "Letters From Iceland" (with Louis MacNeice) and "Journey to a War" (with Christopher Isherwood). Auden's early prose ranges from extravagant, indiscreet travel diaries to sharply observed critiques of writers from John Skelton to Winston Churchill. It includes studies of communism and Christianity, wide-ranging essays on literature, psychology and politics, and writings about gossip, sex, prisons and schools. The verse "Last Will and Testament", from "Letters From Iceland", is annotated. ... Read more

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The third volume of Auden Studies focuses on the later career of this major poet and intellectual, and includes a great deal of previously unpublished prose by him, as well as a selection from his letters. The writings demonstrate the Goethean scope of his intellect, which ranged easily from psychoanalysis to theology, archaeology to politics. "In Solitude, for Company" includes two unpublished and little-known lectures (one on vocation, delivered during the troubled war years when Auden was questioning his own vocation, one on Sigmund Freud). The volume also features Auden's correspondence with his close friends James and Tania Stern, which reveals new and starting biographical information. Each piece is annotated and introduced by an Auden specialist, several of whom also contribute to a symposium, included here, on Auden's great poem "In Praise of Limestone." ... Read more

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This scholarly volume contains all the dramatic works of Auden's early years. It includes the three Auden-Isherwood plays - "The Dog Beneath the Skin", "The Ascent of F6" and "On the Frontier", and plays written by Auden alone - "Paid on Both Sides" and "The Dance of Death". The text and notes include unpublished poems and scenes written for each of the plays, with the ending Auden wrote for the first production of "The Dog Beneath the Skin". Two previously unpublished plays are included - "The Enemies of a Bishop" and "The Chase", as are the surviving fragments of another play, "The Fronny". This volume is the first in a projected complete edition of Auden's works. ... Read more

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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 C. Day Lewis. But he was also an intimate and lyrical poet of great originality, and a master craftsman of some of the most cherished and influential poems of the past century. Other volumes in this series include: "Betjemen", "Eliot", "Plath", "Hughes" and "Yeats". ... Read more

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Beautiful book!!
Love this book. The graphics are very cute. It is somewhat padded on the covers and I did not know that prior to purchase. I get compliments on this book all the time. ... Read more

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You know the terror that for poets lurks  Beyond the ferry when to Minos brought.Poets must utter their Collected Works,  Including Juvenilia.. . .--from "Letter to Lord Byron" (1936)

Regardless of how poets feel about their youthful attempts at verse, their early poems not only enrich our understanding of their artistic growth, but also reveal much about the nature of literary genius. No other twentieth-century poet has left behind such a wealth of early poetry as did W. H. Auden. By bringing together for the first time all the poems written by Auden between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one (1922-1928), this book allows us a rare, detailed look at the literary personality, development, and preoccupations of a major poet. Auden's readers will be fascinated to find in these poems the earliest evidence of his interest in psychoanalysis, his conflicted attitude toward his homosexuality, his self-conscious approach to poetry, and his life-long journey toward a religious sense of the world.

This collection includes over two hundred poems, most of them never published before, concluding with the contents of Auden's privately printed volume, Poems (1928). The poems are generously annotated with information on Auden's education, reading, literary concerns, and personal life. In her introduction, Katherine Bucknell traces important themes relating to the poet's entire career, and describes crucial but hitherto unknown aspects of his youth during his years at Gresham's School and at Christ Church, Oxford. Throughout this work we see in Auden an admirable instinct for experiment, a thorough testing of tradition, and a gathering mastery of technique and thematic argument. ... Read more

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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 prose that Auden published or prepared for publication between 1949 - when he wrote his first book of criticism, "The Enchafed Flood" - and december 1955, shortly before he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford and began the series of lectures that he published, with much else, in "The Dyer's Hand". The texts throughout this edition are, wherever possible, newly edited from Auden's manuscripts, and the notes report variant readings from all published versions. ... Read more

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Jarrell's witty, pointed, and long-lost lectures trace the evolution of Auden's style from the late 1920s to the early 1950s and examine the ideas and contexts that animated his poetry, including psychoanalysis, leftist politics, and Christian theology. Delivered at Princeton University in 1952, these six lectures offer new insights into Auden's poetry, particularly his long poems, and Jarrell's own work as critic and poet.