''Poems'' is the title of three separate collections of the early poetry of W. H. Auden. Auden refused to title his early work because he wanted the reader to confront the poetry itself. Consequently, his first book was called simply ''Poems'' when it was printed by his friend and fellow poet

Stephen Spender Sir Stephen Harold Spender (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by th ...

in 1928; he used the same title for the very different book published by

Faber and 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 1930 (2nd ed. 1933), and 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 ...

in 1934, which also included '' The Orators'' and ''

The Dance of Death The ''Danse Macabre'' (; ) (from the French language), also called the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory of the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death. The ''Danse Macabre'' consists of the dead, or a personification ...

''. The privately-printed 1928 edition of ''Poems'' was of "about 45 copies", as stated on its limitation page; probably only around 30 copies were actually printed. It is one of the great rarities of twentieth century literature. The 1930 commercially published edition of ''Poems'' appeared from Faber and Faber in 1930, having been accepted by T. S. Eliot; it was printed in an edition of 1,000 copies. Only a small number of the poems in the 1928 version survived into the 1930 volume. Written in a

gnomic Gnomic may refer to: * Gnomic aspect, a grammatical mood or tense expressing a general truth * Gnomic will, a concept in Eastern Orthodox theology * Gnomic poetry, a poetic form * A Gnome (rhetoric) or gnomic saying See also * Gnomon * Gnomonic ...

, seemingly obscure style, the poems and the play ''Paid on Both Sides'' included with them, were extraordinarily influential. The compression of their style, their presentation of a personality "frustrate and vexed" that could be seen as a metaphor for the ''

zeitgeist In 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy, a ''Zeitgeist'' () ("spirit of the age") is an invisible agent, force or Daemon dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history. Now, the term is usually associated with Georg W. ...

'' of a country—plainly England, struck a wholly new, modernist note. Not allusive like Eliot's ''

The Waste Land ''The Waste Land'' is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of Modernist poetry in English, modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the ...

'' (1922), the numbered poems in the volume, as well as the play, were as difficult and rich as that work but, unlike it, seemed to come from a person speaking in a private but significant code. The impression derives from the density of rhetorical device, but some of it also comes from the author's stoic, detached attitude toward his own intense emotional life. Some of these mannerisms were copied in the work of Spender and

Cecil Day-Lewis Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis; 27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972), often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Irish-born British poet and Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Bla ...

. For this reason critics dubbed these contemporary writers, who also saw England in parlous condition, as "the Auden generation." In 1933, when ''Poems'' was reprinted, Auden replaced seven of the poems in the 1930 edition with poems that he had written during the year 1930, after completing the 1930 version of the book. Auden revised or dropped many of the poems in the 1933 edition for the collections and selections that he prepared in the 1940s and later. The 1934 edition, published by Random House, was Auden's first published book in the United States. The publisher included all three of the books that Auden had published in the UK in this volume. For a few readers and critics, such as

Randall Jarrell Randall Jarrell (May 6, 1914 – October 14, 1965) was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poe ...

, the 1930 and 1933 versions remain Auden's greatest achievement.

References

*''W. H. Auden: A Bibliography'', by B. C. Bloomfield and Edward Mendelson, 2nd edition (1973) * Edward Mendelson, ''Early Auden'' (1981)

External links

Books
at the W. H. Auden Society {{W. H. Auden 1928 poetry books 1930 poetry books 1934 poetry books Poems (1930) Books by W. H. Auden Faber and Faber books