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Selected Poems

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Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Selected Poems by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, presents an expanded, chronologically ordered collection that broadens the scope of Auden's work. This edition includes over 120 poems showcasing Auden's diverse styles and themes, from his renowned war-time quatrains to the light verse haiku sequence Profiles and the celebrated Funeral Blues. The volume also features brief notes elucidating obscure references and a revised introduction reflecting recent scholarship.
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This collection is ideal for students, poetry enthusiasts, and readers interested in 20th-century literature and the evolution of Auden's poetic voice.

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A new and expanded edition of W.H. Auden's poems.

W. H. Auden, Selected Poems: '[He] has made himself into a kind of unofficial poet laureate. If I am bombed I hope he will write a few sapphics about me.' Stephen Spender, 1941

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Edward Mendelson has significantly expanded his authoritative, chronologically ordered edition of Auden's Selected Poems (first published in 1979), adding twenty items to the hundred in the original edition. This new edition broadens the focus to reflect the wealth of forms, the rhetorical and tonal range, and the variousness of content in Auden's poetry, all within the confines of one volume.

In particular, there are newly included examples of Auden's mastery of light verse: the self-descriptive sequence of haiku called 'Profiles', the barbed wartime quatrains of 'Leap Before You Look', and 'Funeral Blues' itself. Also included are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure, along with a revised introduction drawing on recent additions to the Auden scholarship.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780571241538

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 04 February 2010

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Faber & Faber

Edition: Main

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 27.0mm

Width: 130.0mm

Height: 197.0mm

Weight: 420g

Pages: 376

About the Author

W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907, and brought up in Birmingham. He went to Christ Church College, Oxford, where Stephen Spender privately printed a booklet of his poems. After university he lived for a time in Berlin, before returning to England to teach. His first book, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber in 1930. Other volumes of poems and plays followed during the 1930s. He went to Spain during the civil war, to Iceland (with Louis MacNeice) and later travelled to China. In 1939 he and Christopher Isherwood left for America, where Auden spent the next fifteen years lecturing, reviewing, writing poetry and opera librettos, and editing anthologies. He became an American citizen in 1946, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. In 1956 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and a year later went to live in Kirchstetten in Austria, after spending several summers on Ischia. He died in Vienna in 1973.

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