Finalist for the 2014 American Academy of Religion Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, in the Constructive-Reflective category In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary history of ideas, Andrew W. Hass explores the ascendency of the concept of nothing into late modernity. He argues that the rise of the reality of nothing in religion, philosophy, and literature has taken place only against the decline of the concept of One: a shift from a sovereign understanding of the One (unity, universality) toward the "figure of the O"—a cipher figure that, as nonentity, is nevertheless determinant of other realities. The figuring of this O culminates in a proliferation of literary expressions of nothingness, void, and absence from 1940 to 1960, but by century's end, this movement has shifted from linear progression to mutation, whereby religion, theology, philosophy, literature, and other critical modes of thought, such as feminism, merge into a shared, circular activity. The writer W. H. Auden lends his name to this O, his long poetic work The Sea and the Mirror an exemplary manifestation of its implications. Hass examines this work, along with that of a host of writers, philosophers, and theologians, to trace the revolutionary hermeneutics and creative space of the O, and to provide the reasoning of why nothing is now such a powerful force in the imagination of the twenty-first century, and of how it might move us through and beyond our turbulent times.

Fifteen famous love poems and cabaret songs written in the 1930s by W. H. Auden, including 'Funeral Blues' as featured in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Written in the midst of World War II after its author emigrated to America, "The Sea and the Mirror" is not merely a great poem but ranks as one of the most profound interpretations of Shakespeare's final play in the twentieth century. As W. H. Auden told friends, it is "really about the Christian conception of art" and it is "my Ars Poetica, in the same way I believe The Tempest to be Shakespeare's." This is the first critical edition. Arthur Kirsch's introduction and notes make the poem newly accessible to readers of Auden, readers of Shakespeare, and all those interested in the relation of life and literature--those two classic themes alluded to in its title. The poem begins in a theater after a performance of The Tempest has ended. It includes a moving speech in verse by Prospero bidding farewell to Ariel, a section in which the supporting characters speak in a dazzling variety of verse forms about their experiences on the island, and an extravagantly inventive section in prose that sees the uncivilized Caliban address the audience on art--an unalloyed example of what Auden's friend Oliver Sachs has called his "wild, extraordinary and demonic imagination." Besides annotating Auden's allusions and sources (in notes after the text), Kirsch provides extensive quotations from his manuscript drafts, permitting the reader to follow the poem's genesis in Auden's imagination. This book, which incorporates for the first time previously ignored corrections that Auden made on the galleys of the first edition, also provides an unusual opportunity to see the effect of one literary genius upon another.

Although Auden has often been hailed as the twentieth century’s master of metre and most outstanding practitioner of traditional poetic forms, his metrical art still remains a mystery, as far as its real significance is concerned. This book sheds new light on the enticing appeal of formal poetry which induced Auden into composing in almost every possible stanza form. In order to work out a ‘new’ appreciative assessment of Auden’s formal art, the book uses Amittai Aviram’s theory of poetic rhythm, which transcends the common literary critical process, based on the rhetorical assessment of rhythm in poetry. Aviram’s theory clearly revolutionises our common methods of interpretation regarding rhythm rather than meaning as the starting point in reading poetry; it is the poem’s ideas and theme which express and strengthen rhythm, not the other way round. Such conception of rhythm, as allegorized by meaning (images and metaphors), breathes new life into the outworn Russian formalist tradition. Turning to Auden’s poetry today may be said to be urged by both literary and political contexts; in an age marked by uncertainties and an upsurge of violence, poetry’s voice, regrettably, reverberates less forcefully, sinking into a state of formal loosening. As such, this book may be said to be prompted by a ‘necessity’ to revive the interest in Auden’s poetry, especially given its recent neglect. A reconsideration of Auden’s conception of the nature of poetry and its status enables us to encrypt his verbal art, assess its multiple effects, and appreciate the metrical range that has helped the poet handle so subtly his twofold inquiry: What is poetry? What is its use?

This book defines, analyses, and theorises a late modern 'etymological poetry' that is alive to the past lives of its words, and probes the possible significance of them both explicitly and implicitly. Close readings of poetry and criticism by Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon investigate the implications of their etymological perspectives for the way their language establishes relationships between people, and between people and the world. These twin functions of communication and representation are shown to be central to the critical reception of etymological poetry, which is a category of 'difficult' poetry. However resonant poetic etymologising may be, critics warn that it shows the poet's natural interest in language degenerating into an unhealthy obsession with the dictionary. It is unavoidably pedantic, in the post-Saussurean era, to entertain the idea that a word's history might have any relevance to its current use. As such, etymological poetry elicits the closest of close readings, thus encouraging readers to reflect not only on its own pedantry, obscurity, and virtuosity, but also on how these qualities function in criticism. As well as presenting a new way of reading three very different late modern poet-critics, this book addresses an understudied aspect of the relationship between poetry and criticism. Its findings are situated in the context of literary debates about difficulty and diction, and in larger cultural conversations about the workings of language as a historical event.

The National Book Award–winning novel by the writer whom Fran Lebowitz called “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald” Joe Chapin led a storybook life. A successful small-town lawyer with a beautiful wife, two over-achieving children, and aspirations to be president, he seemed to have it all. But as his daughter looks back on his life, a different man emerges: one in conflict with his ambitious and shrewish wife, terrified that the misdeeds of his children will dash his political dreams, and in love with a model half his age. With black wit and penetrating insight, Ten North Frederick stands with Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, Evan S. Connell’s Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, the stories of John Cheever, and Mad Men as a brilliant portrait of the personal and political hypocrisy of mid-century America. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The first critical edition of Auden's only explicitly religious long poem For the Time Being is a pivotal book in the career of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden had recently moved to America, fallen in love with a young man to whom he considered himself married, rethought his entire poetic and intellectual equipment, and reclaimed the Christian faith of his childhood. Then, in short order, his relationship fell apart and his mother, to whom he was very close, died. In the midst of this period of personal crisis and intellectual remaking, he decided to write a poem about Christmas and to have it set to music by his friend Benjamin Britten. Applying for a Guggenheim grant, Auden explained that he understood the difficulty of writing something vivid and distinctive about that most clichéd of subjects, but welcomed the challenge. In the end, the poem proved too long and complex to be set by Britten, but in it we have a remarkably ambitious and poetically rich attempt to see Christmas in double focus: as a moment in the history of the Roman Empire and of Judaism, and as an ever-new and always contemporary event for the believer. For the Time Being is Auden's only explicitly religious long poem, a technical tour de force, and a revelatory window into the poet's personal and intellectual development. This edition provides the most accurate text of the poem, a detailed introduction by Alan Jacobs that explains its themes and sets the poem in its proper contexts, and thorough annotations of its references and allusions.