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Poems is the title of three separate collections of the early poetry ofW. H. Auden.[1] Auden refused to title his early work because he wanted the reader to confront the poetry itself. Consequently, his first book was called simplyPoems when it was printed by his friend and fellow poetStephen Spender in 1928; he used the same title for the very different book published byFaber and Faber in 1930 (2nd ed. 1933), and byRandom House in 1934, which also includedThe Orators andThe Dance of Death.
The privately printed 1928 edition ofPoems was of "about 45 copies", as stated on its limitation page; probably only around 30 copies were actually printed. It is one of the great rarities of twentieth century literature.[citation needed]
The 1930 commercially published edition ofPoems appeared from Faber and Faber in 1930, having been accepted byT. S. Eliot; it was printed in an edition of 1,000 copies. Only a small number of the poems in the 1928 version survived into the 1930 volume. Written in agnomic, seemingly obscure style, the poems and the playPaid on Both Sides included with them, were extraordinarily influential. The compression of their style, their presentation of a personality "frustrate and vexed" that could be seen as a metaphor for thezeitgeist of a country—plainly England, struck a wholly new, modernist note. Not allusive like Eliot'sThe Waste Land (1922), the numbered poems in the volume, as well as the play, were as difficult and rich as that work but, unlike it, seemed to come from a person speaking in a private but significant code. The impression derives from the density of rhetorical device, but some of it also comes from the author'sstoic, detached attitude toward his own intense emotional life. Some of these mannerisms were copied in the work of Spender andCecil Day-Lewis. For this reason critics dubbed these contemporary writers, who also saw England in parlous condition, as "the Auden generation."
In 1933, whenPoems was reprinted, Auden replaced seven of the poems in the 1930 edition with poems that he had written during the year 1930, after completing the 1930 version of the book. Auden revised or dropped many of the poems in the 1933 edition for the collections and selections that he prepared in the 1940s and later.
The 1934 edition, published by Random House, was Auden's first published book in the United States. The publisher included all three of the books that Auden had published in the UK in this volume.
For a few readers and critics, such asRandall Jarrell, the 1930 and 1933 versions remain Auden's greatest achievement.
