The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays was published by Random House in November 1962 and immediately established itself as one of the essential works of literary criticism in English. It collects Auden’s lectures, reviews, and essays from the 1950s and early 1960s — work originally delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry (1956–1961) or published in periodicals — into a unified volume that reveals Auden as one of the most intelligent and entertaining prose minds of his century.
The Essays
The book is organized in six parts, moving from general principles of reading and writing to specific authors and forms:
“Reading” and “Writing” — Auden’s meditations on the act of literary engagement. His distinction between the “frivolous” reader (who uses literature as a drug) and the “serious” reader (who allows literature to change him) remains one of the most useful formulations in criticism.
“The Shakespearian City” — a sequence of essays on Shakespeare’s plays that represents some of the most original Shakespeare criticism ever written. Auden’s reading of The Merchant of Venice, his essay on Falstaff, his analysis of Othello as a study in the nature of evil — these are works of genuine intellectual discovery, not academic explication.
“The Well of Narcissus” — essays on Poe, the American literary character, and related subjects.
“Homage to Igor Stravinsky” — essays on music and opera, including the extraordinary “Notes on Music and Opera” and Auden’s reflections on writing libretti (he and Chester Kallman wrote the libretto for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress).
“The Globe” — further Shakespeare essays.
Method and Style
Auden’s critical prose is aphoristic, personal, and morally engaged. He writes as a practicing poet thinking about what poetry does and what it costs — not as an academic constructing interpretive frameworks. His sentences have the quality of proverbs: “The only person who has the right to say that he understands poetry is the person who writes it.”
He organizes by principle rather than chronology, by moral category rather than genre. His criticism is ultimately theological in orientation — he is always asking what relationship art bears to truth, to goodness, to the proper ordering of human life. This gives even his lightest essays a seriousness that transcends the academy.
Critical Reception
The book was immediately recognized as major. Random House initially printed it as a literary criticism title; it became one of Auden’s best-selling prose works. Reviewers noted its combination of erudition and accessibility — Auden never condescends, but he never obscures either.
It remains in print and widely taught. Among poets and critics, it occupies a position comparable to T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays or Randall Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age — one of those works of criticism that itself achieves the status of literature.
Collecting The Dyer’s Hand
First edition (Random House, New York, 1962): Blue cloth binding with gold lettering. Dust jacket with typographic design in blue and white.
Identification points:
- “FIRST PRINTING” stated on copyright page
- 527 pages
- Random House colophon
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $150–$400. Not scarce in absolute terms, but fine jacketed copies are genuinely uncommon — the book was read, used, and worn by working critics and students.
Signed copies: $500–$1,200. By 1962, Auden was signing more freely than in his youth.
First UK edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1963): Published one year later. Similar values to the American edition.