{"title":"Series: W.H. Auden: Critical Editions","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"the-shield-of-achilles-by-w-h-auden-9780691218656","title":"The Shield of Achilles","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBack in print for the first time in decades,\u003c\/strong\u003e Auden's National Book Award-winning poetry collection, in a critical edition that introduces it to a new generation of readers.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Shield of Achilles\u003c\/em\u003e, 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 title poem, which reimagines Achilles's shield for the modern age, when war and heroism have changed beyond recognition, the book also includes two sequences—'Bucolics' and 'Horae Canonicae'—that Auden believed to be among his most significant work. Featuring an authoritative text and an introduction and notes by Alan Jacobs, this volume brings Auden's collection back into print for the first time in decades and offers the only critical edition of the work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAs Jacobs writes in the introduction, Auden's collection \"is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged.\" Describing the book's formal qualities and careful structure, Jacobs shows why \u003cem\u003eThe Shield of Achilles\u003c\/em\u003e should be seen as one of Auden's most central poetic statements—a richly imaginative, beautifully envisioned account of what it means to live, as human beings do, simultaneously in nature and in history.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47455805079788,"sku":"9780691218656","price":58.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780691218656.jpg?v=1774799848"},{"product_id":"the-age-of-anxiety-by-w-h-auden-9780691138152","title":"The Age of Anxiety","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen it was first published in 1947, \u003cem\u003eThe Age of Anxiety\u003c\/em\u003e—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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBeginning 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 War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis volume—the first annotated, critical edition of the poem—introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs's introduction and thorough annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47471710568684,"sku":"9780691138152","price":63.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780691138152-the-age-of-anxiety.jpg?v=1775250096"},{"product_id":"juvenilia-by-w-h-auden-9780691102818","title":"Juvenilia","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eYou know the terror that for poets lurks Beyond the ferry when to Minos brought. Poets must utter their Collected Works, Including \u003cem\u003eJuvenilia\u003c\/em\u003e... —from \"Letter to Lord Byron\" (1936)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eRegardless 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBy 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis collection includes over two hundred poems, most of them never published before, concluding with the contents of Auden's privately printed volume, \u003cem\u003ePoems\u003c\/em\u003e (1928). The poems are generously annotated with information on Auden's education, reading, literary concerns, and personal life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47596718555372,"sku":"9780691102818","price":84.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780691102818-juvenilia.jpg?v=1777938278"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/collections\/series-w-h-auden-critical-editions.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}