Auden at Work

This collection of essays from a distinguished, international group of scholars offer a portrait of W.H. Auden's creativity, tracing the process of thinking and creation in one of the great literary minds of the twentieth century. The essayists look in fresh ways at this canonical author's composition process and artistic virtuosity, and at the astonishing breadth of his interests and activities. Critics have long acknowledged Auden's 'second thoughts' with regard to religion and politics, yet few have considered how much re-thinking and revision are essential characteristics of Auden's writing process more broadly. His notebooks and drafts serve as a fascinating, multifaceted laboratory for his literary experiments. Even after his writing had seen publication, Auden never stopped revising it. The essays also explore the cross-pollinations in the genesis of his works: how theater collaboration, wartime activities, film work, travelling, teaching, and reviewing shaped his literary oeuvre. They uncover neglected episodes that affected his artistic choices, and overlooked archives full of surprising revelations about his writing practice. The essays also explore manuscript evidence that shows the formal experimentation of one the great versifiers of modern poetry.

Bonnie Costello is Professor of English at Boston University, USA. She is the author of many books and articles on modern poetry, most recently, Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life and the Turning World (2008). She is currently at work on a book about poetry and the first person plural, with Auden as the primary case study.

Rachel Galvin is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, USA. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her essays appear in Comparative Literature Studies, ELH, Modernism/modernity, and The Wallace Stevens Journal, and she is the translator of Raymond Queneau's Hitting the Streets. She is at work on two books, Poetry and the Press in Wartime (1936-1945) and Hemispheric Poetics.