![]() ![]() (Although, of course, there's a lot of terrific stuff in Collected that's not in Selected: get both books, is my advice.) ![]() So if you want some of the good stuff, you have to go look at the Selected Poems, in which it's included. ![]() Yeats (the 2nd - 4th stanzas of section 3).īut Auden's Collected Poems reflects - appropriately, I suppose - the poet's final wishes. In other cases he simply eliminated great material, such as the three fabulous stanzas he eliminated from his poem In Memory of W. Further, the explanations he gave for this disowning involved interpretations of them that would elicit C's from an undergraduate: clunky misinterpretations, nuance-less literalism, and the like. Thus, one of Auden's very best poems - Septem- widely quoted in the wake of 9/11 - is not, in fact, in his collected poems. The reason for this is straightforward: among Auden's peculiarities was the habit of heavily revising, or even disowning, some of his best work. Auden's Selected Poems - edited by Edward Mendelson - is an important book, more important than one might deduce even if one knew Auden's status as one of the great 20th Century English-language poets. ![]()
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