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 It includes previously unpublished poems, prose, and letters by Auden--each with a scholarly introduction and full annotation--which reveal how the well-known poet, teacher, dramatist, and sage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...

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 It includes a large amount of unpublished material by Auden, notably six poems written in German in the early 1930s, translated by the poet and David Constantine, and the complete version of his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...

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Auden Studies focuses on the later career of this major poet and intellectual, and includes a great deal of previously unpublished prose by him, as well as a selection from his letters.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."

You know the terror that for poets lurks

Beyond the ferry when to Minos brought.

Poets must utter their Collected Works,

Including Juvenilia.. . .

--from "Letter to Lord Byron" (1936)

Regardless of how poets feel about their youthful attempts at verse, their early poems not only enrich our understanding of their artistic growth, but also reveal much about the nature of literary genius. No other twentieth-century poet has left behind such a wealth of early poetry as did W. H. Auden. By bringing together for the first time all the poems written...