Edward Mendelson has significantly expanded his authoritative, chronological ordered edition of Auden's Selected Poems (first published in 1979), adding twenty items to the hundred in the original edition, and broadening the focus to reflect the wealth of forms, the rhetorical and tonal range, and the variousness of content in Auden's poetry, in 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', or 'Funeral Blues' itself. Also included are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure, and a revised introduction drawing on recent additions to Auden scholarship.

Another Time was the first volume that Auden published after his departure to America with Christopher Isherwood in January 1939. It was dedicated to Chester Kallman. The poems, some of which date from the early thirties, are about people, places and the intellectual climate of the times, and they show greater variety of tone and technique than in any previous book of Auden's. Some of his most famous and often quoted (or misquoted) lines appear in their original form, including the text of two poems in particular - 'Spain 1937' and 'September 1,1939' - that he later altered or repudiated.

This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series of ten titles celebrating Faber's publishing over the decades.

When The Orators was originally published in 1932 it was described by Poetry Review as 'something as important as the appearance of Mr Eliot's poems fifteen years ago'. A long poem written in both prose and verse, it was a powerful addition to the canon of modernist poetry.

Brecht projects an ancient Chinese story onto a realistic setting in Soviet Georgia. In a theme that echoes the Judgment of Solomon, two women argue over the possession of a child. Thanks to the unruly judge, Azdak (one of Brecht's most vivid creations) natural justice is done and the peasant Grusha keeps the child she loves, even though she is not its mother. Written while Brecht was in exile in the United States during the Second World War, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a politically charged, much-revived and complex example of Brecht's epic theatre. This new Student Edition contains introductory commentary and notes by Kristopher Imbrigotta from the University of Puget Sound, US, offering a much-needed contemporary perspective on the play. The introduction covers: - narrative structure: play about a play within a play ("circle") - songs and music - justice and social systems - context: Brecht, exile, WWII, socialism - notions of collective and class - fable and story adaptation, folk fairy tale

The second of two volumes of the eagerly anticipated first complete edition of Auden's poems-including some that have never been published before W. H. Auden (1907-1973) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his reputation has only grown since his death. Published on the hundredth anniversary of the year in which he began to write poetry, this is the second volume of the first complete edition of Auden's poems. Edited, introduced, and annotated by renowned Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, this definitive edition includes all the poems Auden wrote for publication, in their original texts, and all his later revised versions, as well as poems and songs he never published, some of them printed here for the first time. This volume follows Auden as a mature artist, containing all the poems that he published or submitted for publication from 1940 until his death in 1973, at age sixty-six. This includes all his poetry collections from this period, from The Double Man (1941) through Epistle to a Godson (1972). The volume also features an edited version of his incomplete, posthumous book Thank You, Fog, as well as his self-designated "posthumous" poems. The main text presents the poems in their original published versions. The notes include the extensive revisions that he made to his poems over the course of his career, and provide explanations of obscure references. The first volume of this edition, Poems, Volume I: 1927-1939, is also available.

Another Time was the first volume that Auden published after his departure to America with Christopher Isherwood in January 1939. It was dedicated to Chester Kallman. The poems, some of which date from the early thirties, are about people, places and the intellectual climate of the times, and they show greater variety of tone and technique than in any previous book of Auden's. Some of his most famous and often quoted (or misquoted) lines appear in their original form, including the text of two poems in particular - 'Spain 1937' and 'September 1,1939' - that he later altered or repudiated. '[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

This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It included 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.

Who is a major, who is a minor poet? Inevitably, in his introduction, W. H. Auden offers a stimulating rationale for distinguishing between the two. To paraphrase him, one cannot say that a major poet always writes better poems than a minor poet. Nor is it a matter of pleasure the poet gives an individual reader - Auden himself confesses to not liking Shelley but being 'delighted by every line of William Barnes', but not doubting for a moment the former is a major poet and the latter a minor one. One does not always enjoy what one most admires. Yet everyone is to some extent familiar with the work of the major nineteenth century poets and few have had the chance to read the patriotic poems of Thomas Campbell, several of which rank among the finest such poems in English literature, the songs of Tom Moore or his political and social satires, the humorous verse of Thomas Hood, the superb lyrics of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the odes of Coventry Patmore, the satirical poems of Samuel Butler. These poets and many more are discerningly represented in this anthology which puts into the limelight every genuine minor poet (they must have written at least one good poem) born between 1770 and 1870.

'He is a very clever fellow, but he will never be a bishop.' George III 'A more profligate parson I never met.' George IV 'I sat next to Sydney Smith, who was delightful ... I don't remember a more agreeable party.' Benjamin Disraeli 'I wish you would tell Mr Sydney Smith that of all the men I ever heard of and never saw, I have the greatest curiosity to see ... and to know him.' Charles Dickens How one agrees with Dickens. Without doubt, Sydney Smith was the most famous wit of his generation. But there was more to him than that, he was an outstanding representative of the English liberal tradition. Starting as an impoverished village curate he went to Edinburgh as a tutor, and co-founded the Edinburgh Review, the first major nineteenth-century periodical. Happily married, he moved in 1803 to London, where he was introduced into the Holland House circle - of which he quickly became an admired and popular member - but at the age of thirty-eight a Tory government banished him to a village parsonage. There he became 'one of the best country vicars of whom there is a record', and after his two chief causes - the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the Reform Bill of 1832 - triumphed, he was rewarded by a canonry of St. Paul's. This generous selection of his writings gives the full flavour of his mind and intellectual personality. In a characteristically stimulating introduction in which he discusses Sydney Smith both as an individual and as a shining exemplar of the liberal mind, W. H. Auden places him with Jonathan Swift and Bernard Shaw among the few polemic authors 'who must be ranked very high by any literary standard.' As Macaulay said he was 'The Smith of Smiths'.

Owen Barfield's original and thought-provoking works over three-quarters of a century have made him a legendary cult figure. History in English Words, his classic historical excursion through the English language, is now back in print after five years. This popular book is a brief and brilliant history of the peoples who have spoken the Indo-European tongues. It is illustrated throughout by current English words whose derivation from other languages, whose history in use and changes of meaning, record and unlock the larger history. "In our language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust.... Language has preserved for us the inner, living history of our soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness".

In the summer of 1936, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice visited Iceland on commission to write a travel book, but found themselves capturing concerns on a scale that were far more international. 'Though writing in a "holiday" spirit,' commented Auden, 'its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing everyday more powerful and a world-war more inevitable.' The result is the remarkable Letters from Iceland, a collaboration in poetry and prose, reportage and correspondence, published in 1937 with the Spanish Civil War newly in progress, beneath the shadow of looming world war.

The first of two volumes of the eagerly anticipated first complete edition of Auden's poems-including some that have never been published before W. H. Auden (1907-1973) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his reputation has only grown since his death. Published on the hundredth anniversary of the year in which he began to write poetry, this is the first of two volumes of the first complete edition of Auden's poems. Edited, introduced, and annotated by renowned Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, this definitive edition includes all the poems Auden wrote for publication, in their original texts, and all his later revised versions, as well as poems and songs he never published, some of them printed here for the first time. This volume traces the development of Auden's early career, and contains all the poems, including juvenilia, that he published or submitted for publication, from his first printed work, in 1927, at age twenty, through the poems he wrote during his first months in America, in 1939, when he was thirty-two. The book also includes poems that Auden wrote during his adult career with the expectation that he might publish them, but which he never did; song lyrics that he wrote to be set to music by Benjamin Britten, but which he never put into print; and verses that he wrote for magazines at schools where he was teaching. The main text presents the poems in their original published versions. The notes include the extensive revisions that he made to his poems over the course of his career, and provide explanations of obscure references. The second volume of this edition, Poems, Volume 2: 1940-1973, is also available.

Auden's electrifying, enigmatic and extraordinarily influential debut collection was published by Faber in 1930, and simply entitled Poems. For the second edition (1933) he omitted seven items and added new poems in their place. Available again for the first time since 1950, this reissue follows the text of the second edition.

This fifth volume of W. H. Auden's prose displays a great writer's mind in its full maturity of wisdom, learning, and emotional and moral intelligence. It contains his most personally revealing essays, the ones in which he wrote for the first time about the full history of his family life, his sexuality, and the development of his moral and religious beliefs. Among these works are the lightly disguised autobiographies that appear in long essays on the Protestant mystics and on Shakespeare's sonnets. The book also features the full text of his T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, Secondary Worlds, and many unpublished or unavailable lectures and speeches. Edward Mendelson's introduction and comprehensive notes provide biographical and historical explanations of obscure references. The text includes corrections and revisions that Auden marked in personal copies of his work and that are published here for the first time.

W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907. His first full-length collection, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber in 1930. The many volumes he published thereafter included poetry, plays, essays and libretti, and his ceaseless experimentation, consummate craftsmanship and originality established him as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. He died in 1973.

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.

A collection of W.H. Auden's light verse, assembled by his literary executor.

From one of the great modern writers, the acclaimed lectures in which he draws on a lifetime of experience to take the measure of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "W. H. Auden, poet and critic, will conduct a course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research beginning Wednesday. Mr. Auden . . . proposes to read all Shakespeare's plays in chronological order." So the New York Times reported on September 27, 1946, giving notice of a rare opportunity to hear one of the century's great poets discuss at length one of the greatest writers of all time. Reconstructed by Arthur Kirsch, these lectures offer remarkable insights into Shakespeare's plays and sonnets while also adding immeasurably to our understanding of Auden.

Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.

"For the Time Being" is a pivotal book in the career of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden had recently moved to America, fallen in love with a young man to whom he considered himself married, rethought his entire poetic and intellectual equipment, and reclaimed the Christian faith of his childhood. Then, in short order, his relationship fell apart and his mother, to whom he was very close, died. In the midst of this period of personal crisis and intellectual remaking, he decided to write a poem about Christmas and to have it set to music by his friend Benjamin Britten. Applying for a Guggenheim grant, Auden explained that he understood the difficulty of writing something vivid and distinctive about that most cliched of subjects, but welcomed the challenge. In the end, the poem proved too long and complex to be set by Britten, but in it we have a remarkably ambitious and poetically rich attempt to see Christmas in double focus: as a moment in the history of the Roman Empire and of Judaism, and as an ever-new and always contemporary event for the believer. "For the Time Being" is Auden's only explicitly religious long poem, a technical tour de force, and a revelatory window into the poet's personal and intellectual development. This edition provides the most accurate text of the poem, a detailed introduction by Alan Jacobs that explains its themes and sets the poem in its proper contexts, and thorough annotations of its references and allusions."

When it was first published in 1947, "The Age of Anxiety"--W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers.

This volume--the first annotated, critical edition of the poem--introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs's introduction and thorough annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.

W. H. Auden was once described as the Picasso of modern poetry - a tribute to his ceaseless experimentation with form and subject matter. Beginning with Anglo-Saxon poetry and ending with an Horatian expansiveness and conversational sweep, this volume is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in modern poetry after T. S. Eliot. In his lifetime a controversial, outspoken, yet enigmatic, writer, Auden has gradually come to seem an intimate poet, as we have learned to read him correctly. This volume is the best possible introduction to his consummate craftsmanship and his unparalleled originality which made him the master-poet of his generation.