Series: W.H. Auden: Critical Editions

Back in print for the first time in decades, Auden's National Book Award-winning poetry collection, in a critical edition that introduces it to a new generation of readers. The Shield of Achilles, which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H. Auden's most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry. In addition to its famous...

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...

When it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety—W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem—immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World...