About the House was published by Random House in 1965 and is Auden’s most intimate and genial collection — a sequence of twelve poems each dedicated to a room in the farmhouse he and Chester Kallman owned in Kirchstetten, Austria (purchased in 1957 with the proceeds of his Italian literary prize). Each poem is addressed to a friend: “The Cave of Making” (the study) to Louis MacNeice, “The Geography of the House” (the bathroom) to Christopher Isherwood, “Tonight at Seven-Thirty” (the dining room) to M.F.K. Fisher.
The Poems
The domestic frame is deceptive. These are poems about civilization itself — about what it means to have a home, to eat together, to sleep, to work, to eliminate, to cook. Auden takes the most ordinary activities and reveals their deep structure:
“The Cave of Making” (For Louis MacNeice) — an elegy for MacNeice disguised as a poem about a study. Auden meditates on the privacy of the creative act, on friendship between poets, on the difference between inspiration and craft.
“Thanksgiving for a Habitat” — the book’s prologue, which establishes that having a house at all is “a marvel” for a twentieth-century man raised on rented rooms and institutions.
“The Geography of the House” — a poem about the bathroom that is also about the body’s honest relationship to the self, dedicated appropriately to Isherwood (whose frankness Auden admired).
“Tonight at Seven-Thirty” — on dining, cooking, and the civilization of shared meals.
“The Cave of Nakedness” — on the bedroom and sleep.
The wit is constant but never merely clever. Auden genuinely believes that the domestic and the quotidian are where most of the moral life takes place — not in grand gestures or public crises but in how one treats a guest, prepares a meal, or organizes a workspace.
Context and Reception
By 1965, Auden was sixty-eight and firmly established as the elder statesman of English-language poetry. He divided his year between New York (winter), Kirchstetten (summer), and various lecture tours. The Austrian farmhouse represented his first owned home — a fact of enormous emotional significance for a man who had spent most of his life in rented rooms, colleges, and borrowed apartments.
Critical reception was warm but not universally enthusiastic. Some reviewers — particularly those who remembered the political urgency of the 1930s poems — found the domesticity too comfortable, too resigned. Others recognized that Auden’s celebration of the ordinary was itself a moral and aesthetic position, achieved against the temptations of grandiosity and despair.
Collecting About the House
First edition (Random House, New York, 1965): Light blue cloth binding with gold lettering. Dust jacket with architectural drawing.
Identification points:
- “First Printing” stated on copyright page
- Random House colophon
- 72 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $100–$300. Not a rare book in absolute terms, but the collection’s charm and the Auden name sustain steady interest.
Signed copies: $400–$1,000. By 1965, Auden was signing relatively freely.
First UK edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1966): Published the following year. Similar values.
The collection’s appeal is primarily literary rather than speculative — it doesn’t contain the “greatest hits” that drive high prices for Another Time or The Shield of Achilles. But for readers who love the late Auden — the wise, funny, humane voice — About the House is the essential volume.