Collected Longer Poems

Description

First published in 1968, this companion volume to the Collected Shorter Poems was compiled by W.H. Auden to bring together six of his longer poetic works, originally published between 1930 and 1947. Auden was one of the modern masters of the extended poem, and these works are among his most enduring achievements, both for their technical virtuosity and for the emotional and intellectual precision with which they dissected the malaise and turmoil of their age. Collected Longer Poems includes Paid on Both Sides, Letter to Lord Byron, For the Time Being, The Sea and the Mirror, and The Age of Anxiety.

W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907, and brought up in Birmingham. His first book, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber in 1930. He went to Spain during the civil war, to Iceland (with Louis MacNeice) and later travelled to China. In 1939 he and Christopher Isherwood left for America, where Auden spent the next fifteen years lecturing, reviewing, writing poetry and opera librettos, and editing anthologies. He became an American citizen in 1946, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. In 1956 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and a year later went to live in Kirchstetten in Austria, after spending several summers on Ischia. He died in Vienna in 1973.