1st edition. preceeds english edition, Bloomfield a35a


W.H. Auden (1907-73)
Journey to a War (1939) especially the sonnet sequence "In Time of War" is a parable about the difficulties of politically engaged writing. In January 1939 Auden went to New York and stayed on as reviewer and university lecturer at Ann Arbor, Michigan. Another Time (1940) includes "September 1, 1939", written the weekend war was declared. During the war The Double Man (1941) and For the Time Being (1944) were published. Auden became an American citizen and was refused for active service, but in 1945 he spent a few months in Germany with US Air Force’s Strategic Bombing Survey studying the effects of aerial bombardment, a harrowing experience reflected in "Memorial for a City". "The Shield of Achilles" (1951) is a retrospective vision of war, and one of Auden's most powerful short poems.


In 1937 he went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but was put to work broadcasting propaganda, a job he left in order to visit the front. His seven-week visit to Spain affected him deeply, and his social views grew more complex as he found political realities to be more ambiguous and troubling than he had imagined.[9][23] Again attempting to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 visiting the Sino-Japanese War, working on their book Journey to a War (1939).

The book The Shield of Achilles is a collection of poems in three parts, published in 1955, and containing Auden's poems written from around 1951 through 1954. It begins with the sequence "Bucolics", then miscellaneous poems under the heading "In Sunshine and In Shade", then the sequence Horae Canonicae.