Customer Reviews

Collected Poems (Modern Library)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

Auden is funny, sad, strange, wonderful. Here's a selection from of my favorites:

'When it comes,will it come without warning/ Just as I'm picking my nose?/ Will it knock on my door in the morning;/ Or tread in the bus on my toes?/ Will it come like a change in the weather?/ Will its greeting be courteous or rough?/ Will it alter my life altogether?/ O tell me the truth about love.'

Auden talks about not only love but also truth, justice, every part of the human experience. Here's a short part of "Musee des Beaux Arts":

'About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters: how well they understood/ Its human position; how it takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or/ just walking dully along.'

I cannot find words strong enough to convey how powerful, and how human, this work is.

By the way, in his original 'selected works' Auden re-edited several of his most beloved works - many critics said for the worse. In this particular edition the editor included all of the poems that Auden selected as his best, but in their original forms.

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"

Auden remains one of the greatest poets of modern times. His work is complex, rich, and beautiful. Everyone should read him.

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.

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.

I feel for people like Nate Dorwood who wrote the comment
about the first line in "musee des beaux arts" being "fatuous."
This may be Auden's greatest poem. Ian McEwan recently paid
tribute to it's greatness, and Russian poet Joseph Brodsky,
who admired this poem in particular, claimed that Auden had
"the greatest mind of the 20th Century." Neither of them,
both geniuses themselves, found anything about "Musee" to
be "fatuous."
Perhaps it's time to re-read?

This is a volume for readers who already know that they enjoy Auden's poetry. The editor Edward Mendelson explains that, in calling the book the "Collected Poems," he means that the book includes all the poems Auden wanted to retain in his canon, in their final (sometimes revised) forms. As another reviewer (N. Dorward) warns, that means some popular poems have been left out. But I also think Dorward exaggerates. The number of poems Auden excised from his canon are not "countless," but perfectly countable. And the number of poems excised which readers actually care about is smaller still. In fact, there are really only three poems notably absent from the canon, which Dorward names: "Sir, no man's enemy," "Spain 1937," and "September 1, 1939." These poems are available in both _The English Auden_ and the _Selected Poems_, also edited by Mendelson.

The matter of revision is more serious, but what was a responsible editor to do? Mendelson might have printed both original and revised versions, but the volume is already over 900 pages, and most readers don't even notice the minor tinkering Auden sometimes did with wording. (We may notice that Auden deleted stanzas from "Summer Night" and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," but how many Auden fans are aware that "Lullaby" was lightly revised? And who is to say that the revisions were always unwarranted?) Or, Mendelson might have added a "notes" section indicating where Auden made changes after initial publication. Or, he could have added the excised poems in an appendix. None of these solutions is really suitable given the aims of the volume. There had to be a volume that represented the author's final wishes about his works, and this is it. Don't we all wish we had such a volume from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, however we might have disagreed with their judgment in any given case?

The volume does feature some minor annoyances. I can discern no rationale in the order in which the poems are printed. Why are they not printed either (a) in the order in which they were printed in Auden's books, or (b) chronologically by order of composition, or at least group them by year? I also must insist that the paperback binding is absolutely unsuitable. Because of the sheer number of pages, opening the volume without breaking the spine is impossible. The binding of my copy fell apart after a year of light use, and is now in several pieces which I refuse to discard because they contain all my notes. I would have been glad to spend an extra $5 or $10 for a hardback copy.

For those reviewers who frankly dislike Auden, I would like to attempt a few replies:
1. No poet is to everyone's taste, and it is perfectly legitimate to state, "if you prefer authors X and Y, then you are likely to hate Auden." But please state your expectations and presuppositions. It is no help to us if you merely say "I don't like Auden," unless we know what sorts of poetry you DO like. I would say that if you enjoy poets like Ben Jonson, Donne, Swift, Pope, and R. Browning, you will probably like Auden. But if you prefer poets like Shelley, Whitman, and Dylan Thomas, you are likely to be cool about Auden. Of course you may happen like any combination of poems or poets, but there are usually patterns in any given reader's literary tastes. I don't often find a reader who is equally enthusiastic about both Shelley and Auden.
2. If you want to discover a poet, a "Collected Poems" volume is not the place to start, unless the poet's total output is unusually small (as with Hopkins and T. S. Eliot). Better to provisionally trust an editor's judgment and pick up a Selected Poems volume instead. Auden wrote many unmemorable poems. While it is valuable to read any good author's collected works, I wouldn't recommend trying to read all the poems Auden ever wrote unless you already know that you like Auden.
3. I am at a loss to respond to those who find no depth in Auden. True, he does not often wear his politics or his religion on his sleeve. And he often speaks with his tongue in his cheek, so a reader with no ear for irony is bound to be frequently disappointed. He tends toward abstraction and is not a particularly "visual" poet. As a thinker, Auden tends to be more philosophical than spiritual, and he is almost never "devotional," though he was also capable of writing perfectly frivolous poems. I don't blame a reader who can't find depth in a poem like "Night Mail" or even "On This Island," but if you can't find depth in "Herman Melville," "In Praise of Limestone," or the "Horae Canonicae" sequence, may I gently suggest that you need to learn how to really read a poem ?

W. H. Auden's poetry is so rich, so complex, yet so indicative of one's feelings in life, that I cannot see how anyone can remain unmoved by it. The man's knowledge of history and authors is vast and it shows in his poetry. This is one poet that serious students of literature cannot miss.

... 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.