For many years there existed a general feeling that the selection made by Auden himself in 1968 was far from satisfactory. It was too short to provide a full introduction to such a large body of work; perhaps it was too weighted in favour of the later poetry; at the time it was made some famous poems, or portions of poems, were still under an embargo imposed by Auden himself which remained in force until his death.

This selection, by Edward Mendelson, contains one hundred poems and offers readers a really satisfactory initial survey of Auden's poetry as a whole. Moreover, it is prefaced by a long and very illuminating introduction which is a brilliant examination of the nature of Auden's genius and of his position and stature in twentieth-century literature.