W.H. Auden's Book of Light Verse

Edward Mendelson is the literary executor of the Estate of W.H. Auden and professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Early Auden, Later Auden, and many essays on (and editions of) nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Pynchon. »

W.H. Auden (1907–1973) was born in North Yorkshire, England, the son of a doctor. He studied at Oxford and published his first book, Poems, in 1930, immediately establishing himself as one of the outstanding voices of his generation. Auden emigrated to New York in 1939, where he became a US citizen and converted to Anglicanism. He wrote essays, critical studies, plays, and opera librettos for such composers as Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, and Hans Werner Henze, as well as the poems for which he is most famous. »

W.H. Auden's Book of Light Verse

Preface by Edward Mendelson
Edited by W.H. Auden

Auden's celebrated anthology of light verse is packed with surprising finds while also offering a striking rethinking of the poetic canon. Commissioned by Oxford University Press in the 1930s, when Auden's own work was at its boldest, the book caught its original publisher off guard. For it is less a collection of humorous verses than a celebration of the popular voice in English, in which the work of great satirists like Swift and Byron keeps company with ballads, chanteys, ditties, nursery rhymes, street calls, bathroom graffiti, epitaphs, folk songs, vaudeville turns, limericks, and blues. Turning away from the post-Romantic cult of the sentimental lyric, Auden features poetry that is clear, enjoyable, and, no matter its age, absolutely modern.

This new edition includes previously censored poems, together with Auden's remarkable introduction and a new preface by his literary executor, Edward Mendelson.

Reviews

As a commentary on poetry or the nature of poetry or anything-else-you-like of poetry, this book is worth a hundred laboured volumes of criticism.
— The Listener

One of the liveliest and most original anthologies ever compiled. There is punch in these pages.
— Times Literary Supplement

Also see:

The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard
Edited and with an introduction by W.H. Auden

Auden's inspired and incisive response to a thinker who had done much to shape his own beliefs is a fundamental reading of an author whose spirit remains as radical as ever more than 150 years after he wrote.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $17.95
Price: $14.36 (20% off)

Jul 31, 2004
584 pages
ISBN: 159017089X
9781590170892
NYRB Classics
Poets & Poetry

Find us on Facebook