The Dyer’s Hands – W.H. Auden

First edition, first printing, stated. Published by Random House in 1962. Original dust jacket unclipped. Slight fading at edges, else very good.

In this work, Auden assembled, edited, and arranged the best of his prose writing, including the famous lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The result is less a collection of essays in the formal sense than an extended and linked series of observations, chiefly on poetry but, more widely, on art and the observation of life in general. As Mr. Auden says in his Preface: “A poem must be a closed system, but there is something, in my opinion, lifeless, even false, about systematic criticism. In going over my critical pieces, I have reduced them, where possible, to sets of notes because, as a reader, I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.”

The result is a surprisingly personal – even intimate-view of the author’s mind—a sort of modern Biographia Literaria whose main subject is Poetry and whose central focus is Shakespearian poetry, but whose province is the author’s whole experience of the twentieth century.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was a British-American poet, noted for his poetic engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion.