Start with Selected Poems, and specifically with an annotated edition that prints the early work in its original versions. The obvious alternative is a complete or collected Auden, and it is the wrong first purchase for a reason peculiar to this poet: Auden revised his own poems for decades, sometimes reversing their meaning, and he suppressed several of his most famous ones outright. He came to regard the poem beginning "September 1, 1939" as dishonest and cut it from his collected editions, and did the same to the long poem "Spain". Different books genuinely give you different poems, and in some cases different texts of the same poem.
So the edition question is not pedantry here, it is the first decision. Edward Mendelson's selection is the standard recommendation because it covers all four decades, prints the early poems as they were first published rather than as Auden later rewrote them, and is annotated — which matters, because the 1930s poems are thick with private, topical and political reference that has stopped being obvious.
The second thing to settle is pace. This is 358 pages and the path allows six to eight weeks for it, which is deliberately slow. Poetry is not read at prose speed, and Auden punishes skimming more than most. Five to ten pages an evening, three or four poems at a time, and read every one aloud at least once. He wrote for the ear: the metre is doing argumentative work, and lines that look flat on the page turn out to have a rhythm carrying the sense.
The individual collections
Four short books, roughly 450 pages together, read in chronological order, which is also easiest to hardest.
Another time holds a remarkable number of the poems people know — the elegies, the love poems, the public voice of the late 1930s. The sea and the mirror is a commentary on The Tempest in a range of borrowed verse forms and is only 106 pages, which is misleading: it will take longer than a 400-page novel. The age of anxiety is a long dramatic poem in alliterative metre, and it should be read in sections with breaks — the metre is hypnotic in small doses and exhausting in large ones. The shield of Achilles is the mature Auden, quieter and stranger, and contains the title poem that many readers consider his best.
Do not be misled by page counts anywhere in this stage. Ten to fourteen weeks for four thin books is the right allowance.
The prose
This is the easiest reading in the path and the most underrated part of Auden. The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays is the major collection and is lucid, funny and quotable throughout. Forewords and afterwords gathers introductions and reviews and is best read a piece at a time over months. A certain world is a commonplace book arranged alphabetically — Auden's own anthology of things he wanted to keep — and is designed to be dipped into rather than read through.
Around 1,500 pages across the three, but in ordinary hours rather than poetry hours.
The completist tail
The orators is short, hard and can absorb a month on its own; it is early, experimental, half-private, and Auden himself was ambivalent about it. Letters from Iceland, written with Louis MacNeice, is a genuine pleasure and reads quickly — travel writing, verse letters and jokes, and the most likeable book he was involved in. Collected shorter poems, 1927-1957 is best used as a comparison volume against the selection you began with: this is where you can see what he revised and what he cut, which is the whole argument this path opened with.
Where to stop
Most readers are well served by Selected Poems plus The shield of Achilles and The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. That gives you the poems, the late voice and the criticism, and it is a complete picture of the writer. The rest is for people who have decided they want all of him.
More poet and author reading orders are on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: W.H. Auden Reading Order: Where to Start.
Ready to learn something deeply?
Build a reading path — free
