''About the House'' is a book of poems by

W. H. Auden Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...

, published in 1965 by

Random House Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...

(first published in England by

Faber & Faber Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot (an early Faber editor and director), W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel ...

in 1966). The book is in two unnumbered parts, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat", a sequence of poems about Auden's house in Kirchstetten, Austria, and a miscellaneous group of poems headed "In and Out". Almost all the poems were written between 1960 and 1964. The "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" sequence includes 15 poems in different forms, some followed by a "Postscript" generally in

haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or s ...

form. The sequence includes, among other poems, "The Cave of Making", "The Geography of the House", "Tonight at Seven-Thirty", "The Cave of Nakedness", and "The Common Life". One poem in the sequence, "Grub First, Then Ethics", was written in 1958 and was published in Auden's previous book '' Homage to Clio'' under the title "On Installing an American Kitchen in Lower Austria". The poems in the "In and Out" section include "A Change of Air", "You", "Et in Arcadia Ego", "On the Circuit", "After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics", and "Whitsunday in Kirchstetten". This was the first of Auden's books to include the haiku form, which he used in many poems for the rest of his career. The book is dedicated to Edmund and Elena Wilson.

References

* John Fuller, ''W. H. Auden: A Commentary'' (1999) *

Edward Mendelson __NOTOC__ Edward Mendelson (born March 15, 1946) is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the au ...

, ''Later Auden'' (1999)

External links

The W. H. Auden Society
{{W. H. Auden 1965 poetry books Books by W. H. Auden Poetry by W. H. Auden Random House books