![]() First UK edition | |
Author | W. H. Auden |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subject | Commonplace books |
Published | 1970 by Viking Press |
Media type | |
Pages | 438 |
ISBN | 0670209945 |
OCLC | 87076 |
LC Class | PN 6245 .A91 |
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book , by W. H. Auden, is an anthology of passages and quotations from other authors, selected by Auden, arranged alphabetically by subject. He called it "a sort of autobiography." Subjects include time, sin, and landscapes. It was published in 1970. [1]
Commonplace books are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator's particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler's responses. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.
Wystan Hugh Auden was an English-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content. He is best known for love poems such as "Funeral Blues"; poems on political and social themes such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety; and poems on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue is a long poem in six parts by W. H. Auden, written mostly in a modern version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.
Chester Simon Kallman was an American poet, librettist, and translator, best known for collaborating with W. H. Auden on opera librettos for Igor Stravinsky and other composers.
Kirkus Reviews is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980). The magazine is headquartered in New York City.
Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006), about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
The Shield of Achilles is a poem by W. H. Auden first published in 1952, and the title work of a collection of poems by Auden, published in 1955. It is Auden's response to the detailed description, or ekphrasis, of the shield borne by the hero Achilles in Homer's epic poem the Iliad.
George Augustus Auden was an English physician, professor of public health, school medical officer, and writer on archaeological subjects.
John Bicknell Auden was an English geologist and explorer, older brother of the poet W. H. Auden, who worked for many years in India with the Geological Survey of India and later with the Food and Agriculture Organization. He studied the Himalayan strata, particularly the Krol Belt where he recognized rocks from the Peninsula thrusting north into the Himalayas. He also studied groundwater and was involved in studying the geology of many dam sites in India. Auden's Col is named after him.
Spain is a poem by W. H. Auden written after his visit to the Spanish Civil War. Spain was described by George Orwell as "one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war". It was written and published in 1937. Auden donated all the profits from the sale of Spain to the Spanish Medical Aid Committee.
Letters from Iceland is a travel book in prose and verse by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, published in 1937.
Journey to a War is a travel book in prose and verse by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, published in 1939.
The Double Man is a book of poems by W. H. Auden, published in 1941. The title of the UK edition, published later the same year was New Year Letter.
"The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest" is a long poem by W.H. Auden, written 1942–44, and first published in 1944. Auden regarded the work as “my Ars Poetica, in the same way I believe The Tempest to have been Shakespeare’s.”
For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, is a long poem by W. H. Auden, written in 1941 and 1942, and first published in 1944. It was one of two long poems included in Auden's book also titled For the Time Being, published in 1944; the other poem included in the book was "The Sea and the Mirror."
The Dyer's Hand and other essays is a prose book by W. H. Auden, published in 1962 in the US by Random House and in the UK the following year by Faber & Faber
Secondary Worlds is a book of four essays by W. H. Auden, first published in 1968.
Forewords and Afterwords is a prose book by W. H. Auden published in 1973.
"In Praise of Limestone" is a poem written by W. H. Auden in Italy in May 1948. Central to his canon and one of Auden's finest poems, it has been the subject of diverse scholarly interpretations. Auden's limestone landscape has been interpreted as an allegory of Mediterranean civilization and of the human body. The poem, sui generis, is not easily classified. As a topographical poem, it describes a landscape and infuses it with meaning. It has been called the "first … postmodern pastoral". In a letter, Auden wrote of limestone and the poem's theme that "that rock creates the only human landscape."
This is a bibliography of books, plays, films, and libretti written, edited, or translated by the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973). See the main entry for a list of biographical and critical studies and external links.
St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street is a non-fiction book by Ada Calhoun about the history of St. Mark's Place, a three-block stretch of East Village, Manhattan. Calhoun, who grew up on the street, shows how disillusioned bohemians of every era have declared “St. Marks Is Dead” when their era on the street passed. The book was released on November 2, 2015, by W. W. Norton & Company. It was named by many publications one of the best books of 2015.
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