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.
Even engaged readers admit only a handful of the roughly forty-five poems actually land, one counting just seven or eight that grabbed him while the rest slid past unnoticed. Some readers dismiss the tight forms as “overly pat rhyming couplets,” calling the collection as a whole “quite tough and chewy, often frustrating.” A reader working from a secondhand annotated first edition found the previous owner's marginalia disputing Auden's logic poem after poem, at points calling the arguments “feeble in logic.” Auden's ironized, half-serious take on Christianity reads as a mixed signal to at least one reader picking through the religious material, and even an admirer concedes there are “truly outstanding entries, but they're few and far between.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
