Stephen J. Schuler argues that Augustine provided Auden with the language of privation to describe the nature of moral and social evil, enabling him to make sense of the pervasive anxieties produced by World War II. Augustine's works also offered Auden a rationale for his intuition that the physical world, and especially the human body, is intrinsically good. Auden's struggle to reconcile the implications of his Augustinian theology with his attitudes toward romantic love and sexuality are explained by Schuler, who demonstrates how the Augustinian theology of Reinhold Niebuhr helped shape Auden's ideas about human identity and community, which is defined and maintained by love in all its various forms. Finally, Schuler analyzes Auden's Augustinian view of the ethics of poetry.

A “first person narrative,” key to the work and prayer of the current Book of Common Prayer Appeal to those interested in literature or in the history of the BCP In the nearly 40 years since the advent of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the retranslation of the Psalter created for that book has become a standard, used not only by Episcopalians, but adopted by others into their own worship service books and liturgies. Now J. Chester Johnson, one of the two surviving members of the Committee that produced the retranslation, has agreed for the first time to calls to tell the story of this Psalter and the little-known but vital part played in it by acclaimed poet W. H. Auden, whom Johnson replaced on the committee when Auden decided to return to live in England. Despite Auden’s ambivalence about changes in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, he wrote associated articles and poems, authored many letters—some of special liturgical and spiritual significance—and attended Psalter drafting committee meetings. Auden, The Psalms, and Me not only illuminates this untold part of the Episcopal Psalter story but also describes the key elements that drove the creation of this special retranslation.

It is widely acknowledged that W.H. Auden became a Christian in about 1940, but relatively little critical attention has been paid to Aude's theology, much less to the particular theological sources of Auden's faith. Auden read widely in theology, and one of his earliest and most important theological influences on his poetry and prose is Saint Augustine of Hippo. This dissertation explains the Augustinian origin of several crucial but often misunderstood features of Auden's work. They are, briefly, the nature of evil as privation of good; the affirmation of all existence, and especially the physical world and the human body, as intrinsically good; the difficult aspiration to the fusion of Eros and agape in the concept of Christian charity; and the status of poetry as subject to both aesthetic and moral criteria. Auden had already been attracted to similar ideas in Lawrence, Blake, Freud, and Marx, but those thinkers' common insistence on the importance of physical existence took on new significance with Auden's acceptance of the Incarnation as an historical reality. For both Auden and Augustine, the Incarnation was proof that the physical world is redeemable. Auden recognized that if neither the physical world nor the human body are intrinsically evil, then the physical desires of the body, such as Eros, the self-interested survival instinct, cannot in themselves be intrinsically evil. The conflict between Eros and agape, or altruistic love, is not a Manichean struggle of darkness against light, but a struggle for appropriate placement in a hierarchy of values, and Auden derived several ideas about Christian charity from Augustine. Augustine's influence was largely conscious on Auden's part, though it was often indirect as well. Auden absorbed important Augustinian ideas through modern sources such as Charles Williams, Charles Norris Cochrane, and Denis de Rougemont, although he was himself an observant and incisive reader of Augustine's major works, especially the Confessions. This dissertation demonstrates that the works and ideas of Augustine are a deep and significant influence on Auden's prose and poetry, and especially on his long poems.

W.H. Auden's life and work were perhaps best explained and condensed in the words of Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor, when he remarked, "[Auden] grew up in a household in which the scientific inquiries of his father maintained an uneasy truce with the ritualized religion of his mother." Indeed, science and religion were dominant themes in Auden's life and work, which for him were oftentimes one and the same. Auden was hailed as the new T.S. Eliot and as the "coming" man, greatly influencing the future generations of angry young men with his thoughts on science, religion, and the relationship between the two. This book is an exhaustive reference to W.H. Auden. Those new to Auden and his writing will find the work a comprehensive introduction, while Auden scholars will appreciate the quick access it offers to the details of all his poems, plays, libretti, and other pieces of writing. It also includes entries on the people who were closest and most important to Auden, including fellow writers Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Edward Upward, and T.S. Eliot, as well as significant events in his life, such as his arrival in America, his vision of agape, and his search in science and religion for answers to the deep questions of life and existence.

Explores the rise of the idea of nothing in Western modernity and how its figuration is transforming and offering new possibilities. 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.

This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

One of the twentieth century’s most important poets, W. H. Auden stands as an eloquent example of an individual within whom thought and faith not only coexist but indeed nourish each other. This book is the first to explore in detail how Auden’s religious faith helped him to come to terms with himself as an artist and as a man, despite his early disinterest in religion and his homosexuality. Auden and Christianity shows also how Auden’s Anglican faith informs, and is often the explicit subject of, his poetry and prose. Arthur Kirsch, a leading Auden scholar, discusses the poet’s boyhood religious experience and the works he wrote before emigrating to the United States as well as his formal return to the Anglican Communion at the beginning of World War II. Kirsch then focuses on Auden’s criticism and on neglected and underestimated works of the poet’s later years. Through insightful readings of Auden’s writings and biography, Kirsch documents that Auden’s faith and his religious doubt were the matrix of his work and life.