Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957

This volume, first issued in 1966, is Auden's own selection of lyrics, songs, and shorter pieces written across three decades. Early poems address public crisis, borders, and the search for a just city; later ones turn to landscape, friendship, liturgy, and the ordinary day. Recurring forms include ballad, villanelle, sonnet, and cabaret song. Typical subjects are love, betrayal, the 1930s, exile, and the wish to praise without lying. Well-known pieces from the period sit beside less familiar occasional verse. There is no narrative through-line. The book is a personal anthology of short poems, not a collected longer work and not a prose memoir.

Bound in brown and blue image blocked yellow-green cloth. Dark blue slipcase.