"This collection stops at the year nineteen-fifty-seven. In the following year I transferred my summer residence from Italy to Austria, so starting a new chapter in my life which is not yet finished. The poems included cover a span of thirty years, there are, if I've counted rightly, three hundred of them, I was twenty when I wrote the earliest, fifty when I wrote the latest: four nice round numbers. Besides, the volume looks alarmingly big already."--From the foreword.

This is the companion volume to Auden's 'Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957.' It contains 'Paid on Both Sides,' 'Letter to Lord Byron,' 'New Year Letter,' 'For the Time Being,' 'The Sea and the Mirror' and 'The Age of Anxiety'.