This book made available by the Internet Archive.

A Reader’s Guide to

W. H. AUDEN

John Fuller

FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX NFAV YORK

Copyright @    John Fuller

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First United States edition HI70 Printed in the Uriiteri States ol America

Foreword

This book is intended to serve primarily as a commentary on Auden’s poetry and drama, taken in their chronological sequence. My main concern has been to help the reader with difficult passages and to trace some of the sources and allusions, since despite the now happily increasing volume of Auden criticism, there is still nothing quite as systematic or as detailed as the reader would like.

I have omitted unpublished and uncollected poems, translations, prose, radio scripts, and so on. But I believe that there is an advantage to be gained from concentrating on Auden’s central oeuvre: I have been able to give the space due to the works that the reader will wish to know most about, and I have been able to arrange the volume in such a way that it may conveniently be read in company with the Collected Shorter Poems (1966) and the Collected Longer Poems (1968). l This simplification will, I hope, increase the book’s usefulness.

Auden’s work falls into fairly well-defined periods, and I have followed his own four-part division of the 1966 Collected Shorter Poems in my own arrangement, too. The period 1927-32 covers his last year in Oxford, the Berlin visit and the years he spent teaching in Scotland (where The Orators was written). The period 1933-38 sees him teaching in Gloucestershire, working in films and in the theatre, and travelling in Belgium, Iceland, Spain and China. The years 1939-47 are the New York period, when he wrote the four long poems; he emigrated before the outbreak of war and became an American citizen in 1946. From 1948 to 1957 he began to spend

the summers in Ischia, and this is the time of his greatest activity in opera and criticism. In 1957 he moved to Austria, and from 1956 to 1961 was Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

I have been concerned on the whole to acknowledge Auden’s own estimate of his work, and thus to use the latest editions, for two reasons: it is handier for his readers (which is the main point, after all), and it gives Auden some overdue credit for knowing what he is doing. This is not to say that I am not sometimes disturbed by revisions and omissions (and I have felt it necessary to include a chapter on some of the famous poems at present omitted from the canon), but I do feel that Auden criticism has suffered from excessive ideological and bibliographical niggling, and that the time has come to call a slight halt.