Collected Poems: Auden

Rating:
Summary: endlessly fascinating
Review: "Collected Poems" brings together Auden's greatest poetry, which was abundant, diverse and always masterful. It's difficult to describe the breadth of his work -- emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, technically. From a purely technical standpoint, however, I've never seen as many first rate sonnets, sestinas, classical odes by one poet in one place. Auden is the only poet I've ever encountered who seems incapable of writing badly. In my humble opinion, no one surpasses him in the 20th century in the English language.

Rating:
Summary: Wystan Hugh Auden enlivened the English language
Review: ... and will enliven his readers. From the ineffaceable early work to the effervescence of the later, from the casual perfection of his songs, to the dark grandeur of "The Age of Anxiety," Auden's poetry enriches and helps one to live.

It was the late Joseph Brodsky who said that if there were no churches or religions, a religion could be founded on the writings of W H Auden. That is stratospherically high praise, but we see what he means.

Auden's prosodical confidence, his ease with the most difficult of forms, reminds one of an Olympic gymnast. His sobriety and skepticism, his sharp eye and his good cheer, his tone veering from the outrageous in one poem ("Even hate should be precise") to the reverent in the next ("Whitsunday in Kirchstetten") make him one of those poets we cannot readily dispraise without convicting ourselves of envy.

Rating:
Summary: The Ephemeralness of Being
Review: A sad look backwards at the most riveting of human emotions. Auden is the prism through which all of life's strands are discerned, each one becoming omnipotent and enrapturing. He will grasp your soul from the opening and not release it until long after the final words are locked away, deep in the attic of your mind.

Rating:
Summary: I;m Willing to go with Joseph Brodsky
Review: Auden is at once one of the most interesting and heartfelt poets of the 20th Century, whilst being quite underrated as one of the world's best. This volume does an exceptional job in capturing Auden's works in the way that he himself wanted them to be seen. While there are a multitude of purists who cannot abide by any poet's natural tendency to revise his works as life experiences mold his perspective, that Mendelson made the relatively bold decision to publish the augmented Auden is quite refreshing, in my view. These are the works of a man who transgressed the need for set structures, and didn't sacrifice substance for the sake of style. In essence, his poetry was the truest expression of his ideals.

In regards to the book itself, it was tastefully put together, and is a definite asset to any poetry collection. The font and paper stock are smooth and refined, making the poetry easy to read in varying degrees of light. The poems are arranged in a roughly chronological order...once again, the way that Auden himself preferred.

Considering that I own a number of old volumes of Auden's poetry --including first editions-- I can assure any potential buyer that Mendelson took no liberties with this volume. I wish other collections could claim the same.

"Ah, to find a book of a certain Wystan Hugh,
Is to find a gem in a field of residue;
It has been a long time coming, but in my hands I hold
A paper book of Auden, worth its weight in gold"

Rating:
Summary: Nary a disappointment
Review: Auden is at once one of the most interesting and heartfelt poets of the 20th Century, whilst being quite underrated as one of the world's best. This volume does an exceptional job in capturing Auden's works in the way that he himself wanted them to be seen. While there are a multitude of purists who cannot abide by any poet's natural tendency to revise his works as life experiences mold his perspective, that Mendelson made the relatively bold decision to publish the augmented Auden is quite refreshing, in my view. These are the works of a man who transgressed the need for set structures, and didn't sacrifice substance for the sake of style. In essence, his poetry was the truest expression of his ideals.

In regards to the book itself, it was tastefully put together, and is a definite asset to any poetry collection. The font and paper stock are smooth and refined, making the poetry easy to read in varying degrees of light. The poems are arranged in a roughly chronological order...once again, the way that Auden himself preferred.

Considering that I own a number of old volumes of Auden's poetry --including first editions-- I can assure any potential buyer that Mendelson took no liberties with this volume. I wish other collections could claim the same.

"Ah, to find a book of a certain Wystan Hugh,
Is to find a gem in a field of residue;
It has been a long time coming, but in my hands I hold
A paper book of Auden, worth its weight in gold"

Rating:
Summary: Extremely good
Review: I must confess that I tend to favor the epic poem - the Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Spenser.
But I find Auden delightful. He's one of those twentieth century poets who subscribes to the old theme of poetical technique rather than stringing a bunch of loosely connected words together in the knowledge it'll instantly make it thought-provoking simply because it makes no obvious sense.
Auden's poetry makes heavy use of alliteration, and rythmic meter and this lightens the mood immensely.
My two favorite poems have to be 'O where are you going?' and 'Have a good time'.
Try this part-stanza from the latter:

"He arrived at last; it was time by the clock.
He crossed himself as he passed the wood;
Black against the evening sky the vats
Brought tears to his eyes as he thought of their love"

Marvellous.

Or, from the former:

"O where are you going?' said reader to rider,
That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.'"

Auden is precisely the type of poet whom you read on the train, a journey poet of ponderance and easy mood. In some sense he is the modern bucolic, the present eclogue and, with Ted Hughes, is one of the finest english poets of the twentieth century.

Rating:
Summary: A curious fact
Review: In this line-up of approving reviews I have very little to add Ð except for one, rather curious observation. In my classes I could divide my students roughly in two groups: admirers of T.S.Eliot and such of Auden. The effect the two great poets have on their disciples though is very different. The imitators of Eliot by and large came across as complete mediocreties. Auden on the other hand produces a following with at least a modicum of competence. If you have your own poetic ambitions and you want to learn something Ð read Auden! You may not like his stuff, but it is very instructive.

Rating:
Summary: Auden is the best!
Review: Responding to Mr. Sympson's comment below, I have to say that, when I was a young man, I was dazzled by Eliot's language. Now approaching middle age, however, I find him a bit cold. Auden, on the other hand, grows in my estimation every time I read him. His grasp of human emotion is second to none among 20th century poets.

Rating:
Summary: Auden of the anthologies
Review: The work of Auden I know is not the complete Auden, but rather the Auden of the anthologies. It is the Auden of Musee de Beaux Arts and September 1,1939 and Elegy for W.B. Yeats. It is the Auden of memorable lines, ' The universal error bred in the bone , not to be loved/ but to be loved alone'. It is Auden who is a public poet speaking in lines held together not only by internal rhyme, but by a certain majestic authority of statement. It is the Auden whose poetry at its best seems to be saying something significant about the human condition at a particular time of our history.
This I know is not the whole Auden but it is rather that part given to the widest audience in anthology - the public Auden. Here I sense Auden's poetry spoke with a clarity and sense rare especially in his own time.
He does not have the music of Yeats and Wallace Stevens at their best. He is not as some readers on Amazon have suggested the greatest poet in English in the twentieth century. But my own sense he is one of the best.

Rating:
Summary: A collected poems, NOT a complete poems
Review: There are two separate matters to consider here: the nature of this volume of Auden's collected poems, & the poetry itself. To tackle the first issue: this is not a _Complete_ but a _Collected Poems_, & this is a crucial difference. Auden was a perpetual reviser & assembled his canon with care. As with Robert Lowell his revisions are sometimes bewildering attempts to remake himself & his work in a very public manner. Auden grew to hate many of his best & most famous poems, notably "Sir, no man's enemy", "September 1, 1939" & "Spain 1937", & these are all excluded here, along with countless others. Late in his career Auden massively revised & pruned his canon, a project that was apparently prompted by his horror at the unprincipled use of his most famous line ("We must love one another or die") by Lyndon B Johnson in a notorious 1964 t.v. ad. (He was right to distrust that line's easy quotability: in the wake of Sep 11th the poem has enjoyed renewed popularity, which is pretty bizarre for a poem with lines like "Out of the mirror they stare, / Imperialism's face / And the international wrong.") Thus this volume presents a drastically lopsided view of Auden's work, & for this reason I cannot recommend it to anyone as an introduction to Auden's work. Nearly half of this book's 927 pages is taken up by work from the late 1940s up to Auden's death in 1973, & only the most ardent admirers of Auden will be able to find much of value in the final few hundred pages, facile, prolix & chatty verse which greatly disappointed Auden's contemporaries in his lifetime & which reads no better now. Anyone actually interested in the poetry that made Auden an important & influential poet should turn to the _Selected Poems_ & _The English Auden_. The former reprints the earliest printed texts of poems; the latter the texts as they stood when Auden left for the USA. This is an important distinction, especially for one of his most famous poems, "Spain". In the _Selected_ this appears in the 1937 version, which contains a stanza referring to the need to commit "the necessary murder". Orwell viciously attacked this line in a pair of essays, dishonestly distorting it into an apologia for Stalinist purges in "Inside the Whale". Auden, probably in response to the earlier of the two essays, altered the stanza in the 1940 version (entitled "Spain, 1937"), & eventually deleted the poem from his oeuvre. Auden nonetheless (rightly) defended the original version of the line, arguing that it was an honest attempt to speak of the possibility of a "just war", against the absolutist pacificist position that all wars are wrong, while nonetheless not downplaying the brutality of war.

About the poetry I can't say enough within the space of a brief review. Auden is probably the most influential English-language poet of the 20th century, & depending on your perspective must take much of the credit or blame for the midcentury retreat in the UK & US from the modernist & avantgarde styles of the early 20th century. (For good polemical histories of this shift, take a look at Jed Resula's _The American Poetry Wax Museum_ & Keith Tuma's _Fishing by Obstinate Isles_.) Auden was probably the most technically accomplished poet of the century, & yet this is not enough: by the end the verse fell into an obsessively genial & cozy facility carefully gutted of the urgency of his earlier work. His canon is still rather in need of a strongly revisionist survey: his most famous poems are sometimes justly so (the sublime "Lullaby", one of the century's great love poems) and sometimes in need of demotion ("Musee des Beaux Arts" for instance opens with one of the most fatuous lines in all of modern poetry: "About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters."; & the elegy for Freud is like other of Auden's poems disfigured by nursery-talk & condescension). This volume makes me ultimately rather sad, that a poet with such enormous promise (the work he wrote in his early 20s is still utterly astonishing in its accomplishment & daring) never quite made good on it, & even came to hate much of his own best work. Turn to the _Selected Poems_ to get a better measure of what Auden was as a writer.