Auden at Work

This collection of essays from a distinguished, international group of scholars offers a portrait of W. H. Auden's creativity. The essayists look in fresh ways at Auden's composition process and artistic virtuosity, and at the astonishing breadth of his interests and activities. Critics have long acknowledged Auden's 'second thoughts' with regard to religion and politics, yet few have considered how essential rethinking and revision were to his writing process. His notebooks and drafts served as a fascinating, multifaceted laboratory for his literary experiments; and even after his writing was published, Auden never stopped revising it. The essays collected here explore cross-pollination in the genesis of his works: how theater collaboration, film work, traveling, teaching, reviewing, and wartime activities shaped his literary oeuvre. They uncover neglected episodes that affected his artistic choices, and overlooked archives full of surprising revelations about his writing practice. The essays also explore manuscript evidence that shows the formal experimentation of one of the great versifiers of modern poetry.

Bonnie Costello is Professor of English at Boston University, USA. She is the author of many books and articles on modern poetry, most recently, Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life and the Turning World (2008). She is currently at work on a book about poetry and the first person plural, with Auden as the primary case study.

Rachel Galvin is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, USA. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her essays appear in Comparative Literature Studies, ELH, Modernism/modernity, and The Wallace Stevens Journal, and she is the translator of Raymond Queneau's Hitting the Streets. She is at work on two books, Poetry and the Press in Wartime (1936-1945) and Hemispheric Poetics.

Introduction; Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin
1. 'Still Doing It By Hand': Auden and the Typewriter; Hannah Sullivan
2. Auden's 1939 Journal: A Wartime Writer at Work; Rachel Galvin
3. Vehicles of the Ordinary: W. H. Auden and Cinematic Address; Jonathan Foltz,
4. Stages in Life's Way: Theatres of W.H. Auden; Daniel Jean
5. Auden and the Art of Illustration; Emily Hyde
6. A Marriage of True Minds: Collaborative Creativity in the Auden-Kallman Libretti; Reena Sastri
7. Setting Out for 'Atlantis'; Bonnie Costello,
8. The Fallen Empire; Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb
9. Shakespeare's Auden; Michael Wood
10. 'Thinking-Intuitive Types': Poetic Affinities in W.H. Auden and Paul Valéry; Lisa Goldfarb
11. Auden's Preoccupations: Education and The Orators; Evan Kindley
12. Auden's Cold War Fame; Justin Quinn
13. Auden and the Work of The Age of Anxiety; Claire Seiler
14. 'No Permission to be Idle': W.H. Auden's Work Ethics; Tony Sharpe
Select Bibliography
Index