By all means sign of love, but, if you do,
Please make a rare old proper hullabaloo

— from "In Sunshine and In Shade"

W. H. Auden’s poetry contains “multitudes,” as Walt Whitman said of himself. One of the best ways to approach the vast range of Auden’s content and style is to read one of the books of poems that he compiled and published during his lifetime.

This course focused on the first two sections of The Shield of Achilles (1955), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, with emphasis on “Bucolics” and “In Sunshine and In Shade" during the first class, and on the magnificent third section, “Horae Canonicae,” in the second. In the first session, we discussed Auden’s use of playful iambics and complex stanzas to describe an outsider’s deliberately half-successful attempts to regain intimacy with nature, and in the second, the grave syllabics of his most ambitious and successful encyclopedic sequence, in which he integrates patterns of world history and local personal detail.

“Auden was always interested in this idea [...] that one thing (the thesis) always turns into its opposite (the antithesis) and that the interaction of the two leads to a synthesis. [He] was also fascinated by the unsolvable problem of how much of life is governed by necessity (biological, physical, etc.) and how much is chosen through freedom,” says Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

Class met from 6:30–7:45 p.m. on Mondays: October 21 and 28.

Mendelson referenced The Shield of Achilles, edited by Alan Jacobs (Princeton University Press, 2023).

On-demand opportunity! Tuition, which is being offered at a discount, includes access to presentations, recordings, syllabus and transcripts for a limited only.