W. H. Auden

"Written in the midst of World War II after its author emigrated to America, The Sea and the Mirror is not merely a great poem but ranks as one of the most profound interpretations of Shakespeare's final play in the twentieth century. As W.H. Auden told friends, it is "really about the Christian conception of art" and it is "my Ars Poetica, in the same way I believe The Tempest to be Shakespeare's." This is the first critical edition. Arthur Kirsch's introduction and notes make the poem newly accessible to readers of Auden, readers of Shakespeare, and all those interested in the relation of life and literature - those two classic themes alluded to in its title." "Besides annotating Auden's allusions and sources (in notes after the text), Kirsch provides extensive quotations from his manuscript drafts, permitting the reader to follow the poem's genesis in Auden's imagination. This book, which incorporates for the first time previously ignored corrections that Auden made on the galleys of the first edition, also provides an unusual opportunity to see the effect of one literary genius upon another."--Jacket.

About half of these poems are about the rooms in the author's house in Vienna; the others are new poems on various subjects, previously uncollected.

This varied and far-ranging volume contains a substantial selection from the work of one of our most distinguished poets. From his first book, A Crackling of Thorns, chosen by W.H. Auden as the 1958 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, to his most recent, Harp Lake (1988), Selected Poetry provides an overview of the brilliant career in poetry celebrated by John Hollander's appointment as a MacArthur Fellow. It includes work from eleven volumes, almost all out of print, and is published simultaneously with a new collection, Tesserae and Other Poems. Harold Bloom has said of Hollander's last book, "It confirms his authentic eminence, comparable in my judgment to that of Merrill, Ashbery, Ammons and only a few others in his own generation of American poets." Selected Poetry replaces an earlier volume, Spectral Emanations, New and Selected Poems, published in 1978 and now out of print.

Gathers poems by Swift, Byron, Tennyson, Holmes, Carroll, Gilbert, Harte, Housman, Chesterton, Wodehouse, Eliot, Graves, Auden, Amis, and De Uries.