Poems

Auden's electrifying, enigmatic debut collection, entitled Poems, was published by Faber in 1930. For the second edition (1933) Auden replaced seven of the poems with new poems. The present edition follows the 1933 text.'The rhythmic disjunctions in Auden's lines, the fractured elements of narrative or argument, are wakenings to a new reality, lyric equivalents of the fault Auden intuited in the life of his times ... He arrived at a mode that was stricken with premonitions of an awful thing and was adequate to give expression to those premonitions by strictly poetic means.' Seamus Heaney