Collected Poems was published by Random House in 1976, three years after Auden’s death in Vienna on September 29, 1973. Edited by Edward Mendelson — Auden’s literary executor and the foremost Auden scholar — it represents the definitive single-volume edition of one of the twentieth century’s supreme bodies of lyric poetry. The editing was an act of extraordinary scholarly judgment: Mendelson had to navigate between Auden’s lifelong habit of revising, suppressing, and disowning earlier work and the reading public’s attachment to poems in their original forms.
The Editorial Problem
Auden was one of the great revisers and suppressors in literary history. He cut “September 1, 1939” from his canon, calling its most famous line (“We must love one another or die”) a lie. He revised “Spain 1937” to remove lines he considered morally dishonest. He altered early poems to reflect his later theological positions. He disowned poems he considered immature, insincere, or artistically failed.
This created an editorial dilemma: should the Collected Poems print the versions Auden preferred at his death, respecting the author’s final wishes? Or should it print the original, famous versions that had entered the culture as landmarks?
Mendelson’s solution was principled: the Collected Poems prints the poems as Auden left them — his final revisions, his chosen inclusions and exclusions. Poems Auden suppressed are excluded from the main text. This respects the integrity of Auden’s artistic will while the companion volume The English Auden (1977) and later the Complete Works provide access to everything else.
Contents and Organization
The collection is arranged chronologically, from the earliest preserved poems of the late 1920s through the final work of 1973. It includes:
- The compressed, elliptical lyrics of the early 1930s
- The public, politically engaged poems of the mid-1930s
- The great lyrics of Another Time (1940)
- The long works: “For the Time Being,” “The Sea and the Mirror,” “The Age of Anxiety”
- The mature theological collections: Nones, The Shield of Achilles
- The late conversational poems: “About the House,” “City Without Walls”
- The final poems, including “Archaeology” and “A Thanksgiving”
The volume runs to nearly 900 pages and contains approximately 400 poems — a body of work remarkable for both its range and its sustained quality across five decades.
Significance
The Collected Poems established the reading text of Auden for a generation. Until the ongoing Complete Works project (Princeton University Press), it was the standard scholarly edition and remains the most widely owned Auden volume.
It also established Mendelson’s editorial authority. His headnotes, textual decisions, and organizational choices shaped how Auden was read, taught, and understood from 1976 onward. The decision to respect Auden’s suppressions — controversial at the time — has been largely vindicated: it treats Auden as a serious artist who knew his own mind, not as a monument to be preserved against his wishes.
Collecting Collected Poems
First edition (Random House, New York, 1976): Black cloth binding with gold lettering. Dust jacket with photographic portrait of Auden’s famously wrinkled face.
Identification points:
- “First Edition” stated on copyright page
- 696 pages
- Edited by Edward Mendelson (stated on title page)
Market values: First editions in dust jacket bring $75–$200. The book had a large first printing (Auden was a major literary figure; the posthumous collection was a publishing event). It is not genuinely scarce but is collected as the definitive edition of a major poet.
First UK edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1976): Published simultaneously. Blue cloth. Similar values.
The 1991 revised edition (Vintage International paperback) incorporated further textual corrections but is not a separate collecting target.