ABSTRACT
Auden urged Saxe Commins at Random House to issue a one-volume collection of his poems as early as 16 January 1942: ‘I hate to behave with the traditional petulant vanity of the author, but I should like people to be able to get hold of my work’ (quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, ‘W.H. Auden: A Biography’, London: Allen & Unwin, 1981, p. 329). In a letter of 10 June 1951 he explained to Stephen Spender why he had chosen to order the poems achronologically by first lines: ‘My reason for doing that was not to pretend that I have gone through no historical change, but because there are so very few readers who can be trusted to approach one’s poems without a preconceived notion of what that development has been. I wanted to test the reader who believes that my earliest poems are my best; e.g. make him read a poem and then guess its date’ (ibid., p. 331).
