Collected shorter poems, 1927-1957

W. H. Auden

From the Foreword: "In 1944, when I first assembled my shorter pieces, I arranged them in the alphabetical order of their first lines. This may have been a silly thing to do, but I had a reason. At the age of thirty-seven I was still too young to have any sure sense of the direction in which I was moving, and I did not wish critics to waste their time, and mislead readers, making guesses about it which would almost certainly turn out to be wrong. To-day, nearing sixty, I believe that I know myself and my poetic intentions better and, if anybody wants to look at my writings from an historical perspective, I have no objection. Consequently, though I have sometimes shuffled poems so as to bring together those related by theme or genre, in the main their order is chronological."--W.H.A.