The Shield of Achilles

By W. H. Auden

Princeton University Press 2024

Great poets have an air of permanence about them, the illusion that they were born bearing their Collected Verse and will always be front-listed in anthologies, even though Helen Hunt Jackson and Oliver Wendell Holmes are now one with Nineveh and Tyre. To be fair, great poets tend to encourage the illusion, wanting others to forget – and sometimes seeming to forget themselves – that they were ever pimply-faced posers desperate to pay their latest gas bill. There’s no longer the slow, halting crawl to fame and polish, only the spotlight-worthy perfection of finished genius. 

Edward Mendelson’s magnificent annotated Complete Works of W.H. Auden, concluding with two enormous volumes of poetry, was of a piece with this kind of renown-parade, but the little hardcover volumes that Princeton University Press is calving off it help a bit to redress things. Here are the little individual titles of Auden’s working life as a poet, in solid individual editions with extensive annotations. 

The latest, The Shield of Achilles, is edited by Baylor University Humanities professor Alan Jacobs from Mendelson’s edition (Mendelson is the General Editor of this series), and Jacobs provides the Introduction, writing about Auden’s poetic evolution:

Through the first half of the 1940s he had written long poems in which he worked through the implications of his newfound Christian faith for politics and history (For the Time Being), for art (The Sun and the Mirror) and for the psyches of people devastated by war, and by the various dislocations of modernity (The Age of Anxiety). But in the major poems in Nones Auden began reckoning with certain themes that, he came to realize, he had neglected: the embodied life that humans share with other creatures, and the character of genuine human community. 

This process would have continued with 1951’s Nones and then with the subject of this present volume, 1955’s The Shield of Achilles, and of course this academic narrative of working through implications is a comfortable academic illusion, the fiction that poets are always consciously working on those Collected Verse volumes and grand lifelong themes. This isn’t true; 90% of the time, Auden, like all other poets, was simply writing poems, sending them off to editors, fretting over edits, and hoping the 15-pound cheque eventually arrives. In hindsight certain personal preoccupations might emerge, but anyone who’s ever seen a poet assemble an entire volume will know the process far more resembles an epileptic seizure than an Olympian ponder. 

By the time The Shield of Achilles appeared in 1955, some critics were starting to think this selection process had become bloodless on Auden’s part. “The most professional magician is the one who gets bored with magic, who at last really has nothing up his sleeve, not even his arm,” Randall Jarrell wrote when reviewing The Shield of Achilles in 1955, “the most professional orator is the one who gets tired of pleasing and moving his audience – and who, then, does as he pleases, talking slowly and steadily and unemotionally, with learned fantastic elaboration, reversing and inverting half of his old devices, delighted that the fools no longer cheer, no longer cry.” And although readers will almost certainly disagree with Jarrell’s despairing final cry – “If Auden thought a little worse of himself, and a little better of poetry, how different Auden and his poetry would be!” – these kinds of dispatches from the live fire of the critical front line are useful reminders that, so to speak, Auden wasn’t always Auden.

These annotated volumes in the Auden “Critical Editions” series are the same kinds of reminders, muted only a bit by the attendance of 30 pages of admittedly interesting textual notes. There’s pleasure and even some insights to be gained from experiencing The Shield of Achilles all by itself, a slim volume of poetry fighting for your attention at something approximating its own original bantam weight. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News