Another Time
The collection containing Auden's most enduring poems: "Musee des Beaux Arts," "September 1, 1939," "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," and "Lay your sleeping head, my love." Written in the shadow of fascism's rise, these poems negotiate between private happiness and public catastrophe with a cool intelligence that is itself a moral stance. Auden was smart enough to see what was coming and honest enough to admit his own complicity.
Auden became this collection's harshest editor: he came to consider 'September 1, 1939' dishonest, rewrote its most famous line, then expelled the poem from his canon entirely. Light verse and cabaret songs sit beside the great elegies, and the unevenness shows. The poem readers love most here is the one its author spent decades trying to unwrite.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
