Secondary Worlds was published by Random House in 1968, collecting the four T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures that Auden delivered at the University of Kent in 1967. It is Auden’s second major prose collection (after The Dyer’s Hand) and represents his late thinking on aesthetics, theology, and the nature of imaginative creation. The title borrows Tolkien’s term for the self-consistent imagined worlds of fantasy and fiction — a term Auden extends to all literary creation.
The Lectures
“The Martyr as Dramatic Hero” — examines how Christianity creates a new dramatic problem: the martyr who wills his own suffering. Unlike tragic heroes who resist fate, the Christian martyr cooperates with God’s plan, which makes conventional dramatic tension impossible. Auden traces how opera (particularly Verdi and Wagner) solved this problem.
“The World of the Sagas” — analyzes the Icelandic sagas as a unique literary achievement: prose narrative that presents human action without psychological interpretation, without moral comment, without the narrator’s sympathetic identification. Auden argues this is not primitiveness but a sophisticated artistic choice.
“Shakespeare’s The World of Opera” — connects Shakespearean drama to operatic form, arguing that certain Shakespeare plays (particularly the late romances) aspire to conditions that only opera can fully realize.
“Words and the Word” — the theological climax, examining the relationship between human language (words) and divine Logos (the Word). Auden argues that poetry exists in the tension between the two — it is neither purely human expression nor divine revelation, but something that participates in both.
Method and Argument
The unifying argument is that all art creates “secondary worlds” — self-consistent imaginative spaces governed by their own laws — and that the relationship between these secondary worlds and the primary world (reality) is the central problem of aesthetics. For Auden, this problem is ultimately theological: the Primary World is God’s creation; secondary worlds are human creations that may either honor or parody the divine original.
This is Auden’s most explicitly Christian aesthetics, and it reveals how deeply his literary criticism was shaped by his religious commitments. Art is not autonomous; it is always in dialogue with creation itself.
Collecting Secondary Worlds
First edition (Random House, New York, 1968): Blue cloth binding with gold lettering. Dust jacket with typographic design.
Identification points:
- “First Printing” stated on copyright page
- 144 pages
- T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures credit on title page
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $75–$200. A relatively modest collecting item — the book was a small-press-run academic publication, but Auden’s name ensures it never becomes entirely obscure.
First UK edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1968): Published simultaneously. Similar values.
Signed copies: $300–$700. Uncommon but not extremely rare.
The book’s primary value is intellectual rather than monetary. For Auden scholars and serious readers of his criticism, it completes the picture begun by The Dyer’s Hand. The T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures context — Auden reflecting on the legacy of the poet who most influenced him — adds biographical resonance.