In his foreword to this volume, the successor to Collected Shorter Poems 1934-1944 and the last selection of shorter pieces he made in his lifetime, Auden wrote that ‘n 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. Auden (New York, 1945), later issuing the collection in Britain under the title Collected Shorter Poems 1934-1944 (London, 1950). National Book Award for Poetry in 1956.First edition. Auden (1907-1973) had first gathered his shorter poems in 1944 and published them in the United States (his home since 1939) under the title The Collected Poetry of W.H. It begins with the sequence 'Bucolics', then miscellaneous poems under the heading 'In Sunshine and In Shade', then the sequence Horae Canonicae.

The poem is the title work of The Shield of Achilles, a collection of poems in three parts, published in 1955, containing Auden's poems written from around 1951 through 1954. In these contrasting stanzas, Auden reflects on the differences between the vital, lyrical Achaean world described by Homer where, even amid warfare, imagination naturally ran to scenes of peace, and the violent, barren world, lacking any hope and meaning, that Auden himself imagines. In the third scene, a 'ragged urchin' throws a stone at a bird he takes it for granted 'that girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,' and 'has never heard of any world where promises are kept / Or one could weep because another wept.' In the closing stanza, composed of short lines, Thetis cries out in dismay at what Hephaestus has made for her son, 'who would not live long.'

In the second scene, a crowd of ordinary people watch passively as three 'pale figures' are dragged towards and tied to posts. In the first scene described by these stanzas, an anonymous, dispassionate army listens. The stanzas with longer lines describe the scenes of a barren and impersonal modern world that Hephaestus creates in Auden's version. Thetis expects to find scenes of happiness and peace like those described by Homer. The stanzas with shorter lines describe the making of the shield by the god Hephaestus, and report the scenes that Achilles' mother, the Nereid Thetis, expects to find on the shield and which Hephaestus, in Auden's version, does not make. It is Auden's response to the detailed description, or ekphrasis, of the shield borne by the hero Achilles in Homer's epic poem the Iliad.Īuden's poem is written in two different stanza forms, one form with shorter lines, the other with longer lines. Auden first published in 1952, and the title work of a collection of poems by Auden, published in 1955. The Shield of Achilles is a poem by W. H.

The collected poetry of wh auden