"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.

Between 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face. Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken. This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.

To help readers understand Auden's work, the poet and scholar John Fuller examines all of Auden's published poems, plays, and libretti, leaving out only some juvenilia. In unprecedented detail, he reviews the works' publishing history, paraphrases difficult passages, and explains allusions. He points out interesting variants (including material abandoned in drafts), identifies sources, looks at verse forms, and offers critical interpretations. Along the way, he presents a wealth of facts about Auden's works and life that are available in no other publication.

This critical work considers the role played by elements that might be considered aberrational in a poet's oeuvre. With an introductory essay exploring the nature of aberration, these fourteen contributions investigate the work of major 20th-century poets from the U.S., Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Aberration is considered from the standpoint of both the artist and the audience, prompting discussion on a range of important issues, including the formation of the canon. Each essay discusses the status of the aberrant work and the ways in which it challenges, enlarges or supports the overall perception of the poet.

This volume brings together specially commissioned essays by some of the world's leading experts on the life and work of W. H. Auden, one of the major English-speaking poets of the twentieth century. The volume's contributors include a prize-winning poet, Auden's literary executor and editor, and his most recent, widely acclaimed biographer. It offers fresh perspectives on his work from Auden critics, alongside specialists from such diverse fields as drama, ecological and travel studies. It provides scholars, students and general readers with a comprehensive and authoritative account of Auden's life and works in clear and accessible English. Besides providing authoritative accounts of the key moments and dominant themes of his poetic development, the Companion examines his language, style and formal innovation, his prose and critical writing and his ideas about sexuality, religion, psychoanalysis, politics, landscape, ecology, and globalisation. It also contains a comprehensive bibliography of writings about Auden.

Companion to the work of playwright Tom Stoppard who also co-authored screenplay of Shakespeare in Love.

Featuring contributions from some of the major critics of contemporary poetry, Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry offers an accessible, imaginative, and highly stimulating body of critical work on the evolution of British and Irish poetry in the twentieth-century Covers all the poets most commonly studied at university level courses Features criticisms of British and Irish poetry as seen from a wide variety of perspectives, movements, and historical contexts Explores current debates about contemporary poetry, relating them to the volume's larger themes Edited by a widely respected poetry critic and award-winning poet