It is commonplace to say that our civilization is built on the ruins of Greece. W. H. Auden’s splendid anthology locates the truth behind the truism, while filling in the gaps in our knowledge of a people who gave us so much of our cultural legacy.
Every page in The Portable Greek Reader contains some fundamental precursor of the ways in which we think about heroism, destiny, love, politics, tragedy, science, virtue, and thought itself, Included are excerpts from the mythologies of Hesiod; the martial epics of Homer; the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and Heraclitus; Aesop’s fables; poems by Pindar and Sappho; the scientific writings of Euclid, Galen, and Hippocrates; and the history of Thucydides. Presented in their most elegant and authoritative translations, and accompanied by Auden’s brilliant introduction, these selections recreate the Greek world in all its splendor, strangeness, and sophistication.
“Engaging and full and intelligent a command performance, brought off with considerable aplomb.” —The New York Times

The Portable Greek Reader (Portable Library)

Literature & Fiction

AUDEN, W.H.

Contemporary

Penguin Publishing Group

The second volume in the highly acclaimed Auden Studies series, The Language of Learning and the Language of Love considers Auden primarily during the first decade of his literary career as a public figure as well as private man. It includes previously unpublished poems, prose, and letters by Auden--each with a scholarly introduction and full annotation--which reveal how the well-known poet, teacher, dramatist, and sage battled with his literary ancestors, experienced love, and devised a rhetoric to express both homosexual feelings and artistic impulses. Contributions to this volume include poems, songs, and a piece of early travel writing introduced by Auden's new biographer, the historian Richard Davenport-Hines. Lyrics offered to Benjamin Britten as cabaret songs are presented by Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed, and Nicholas Jenkins. Also in the volume is a fascinating array of essays about Auden by leading scholars in the field, including Stan Smith and Katherine Bucknell, and the German scholar and close friend of Auden, David Luke. A further Supplement to B.C. Bloomfield's magisterial Auden Bibliography of 1972 is supplied by Edward Mendelson.

"The Language of Learning and the Language of Love": Uncollected Writing, New Interpretations (Auden Studies)

British & Irish

Clarendon Press

This is the first volume in a new series on the work of poet W.H. Auden. It includes a large amount of unpublished material by Auden, notably six poems written in German in the early 1930s, translated by the poet and David Constantine, and the complete version of his important early essay, "Writing," with a new foreword by its original editor, Naomi Mitchinson. Substantial selections from Auden's letters to Stephen Spender, E.R. Dodds, and Mrs. Dodds are presented with full annotation. Including essays about Auden, his mentors, and contemporaries by leading scholars in the field, and advice on collecting Auden's works, Auden Studies is indispensable for students, bibliophiles, and general readers interested in the great poet and his fellow writers.

"The Map of All My Youth": Early Works, Friends, and Influences (Auden Studies)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

The third volume of Auden Studies focuses on the later career of this major poet and intellectual, and includes a great deal of previously unpublished prose by him, as well as a selection from his letters. The writings demonstrate the scope of his intellect, which ranged easily from psychoanalysis to theology, archaeology to politics. Each piece is annotated and introduced by an Auden specialist, several of whom also contribute to a symposium, included here, on Auden's great poem "In Praise of Limestone."

"In Solitude, for Company": W. H. Auden after 1940: Unpublished Prose and Recent Criticism (Auden Studies)

This significantly expanded edition of W. H. Auden’s Selected Poems adds twenty poems to the hundred in the original edition, broadening its focus to better reflect the enormous wealth of form, rhetoric, tone, and content in Auden’s work. Newly included are such favorites as “Funeral Blues” and other works that represent Auden’s lighter, comic side, giving a fuller picture of the range of his genius. Also new are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure to younger generations of readers and a revised introduction that draws on recent additions to knowledge about Auden. As in the original edition, the new Selected Poems makes available the preferred original versions of some thirty poems that Auden revised later in life, making it the best source for enjoying the many facets of Auden’s art in one volume.

Selected Poems of W. H. Auden

History & Criticism

Vintage

The authors describe their experiences traveling to China in 1938, and share their impressions of the Sino-Japanese War

Journey to a War

Travel

ISHERWOOD, Christopher

Asia

Octagon Books

Some of the most enduring poetry of the twentieth century, read by the legendary Auden himself. This collection features such favorites as "As I Walked Out One Evening," "Musee des Beaux Arts" and "The Shield of Achilles," among many others. A companion book is included with these never-before-released recordings.

Voice of the Poet: Auden

Poetry

Random House Audio |

One of the modern masters of the extended poem, W. H. Auden has selected for this volume the longer poems he originally published between 1930 and 1947, which are among his most enduring achievements, both for their technical virtuosity and for the emotional and intellectual precision with which he dissects the spiritual illnesses of our times. 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.With its companion volume, Collected Shorter Poems, published by Random House in 1967, this collection represents all of his past work that Auden wishes to preserve.This edition is set from the first American edition of 1969 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House.

Collected Longer Poems

Random House]

"Between 1927 and his death in 1973, W. H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face. Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken. This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times."

The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden.

At least half of these poems are about the rooms n Mr. Auden's house in Vienna. The others are new poems on various subjects, previously uncollected.

About the House

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