The Dyer's Hand (Vintage International)

In this volume, W. H. Auden assembled, edited, and arranged the best of his prose writing, including the famous lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry.  The result is less a formal collection of essays than an extended and linked series of observations--on poetry, art, and the observation of life in general.  The Dyer's Hand is a surprisingly personal, intimate view of the author's mind, whose central focus is poetry--Shakespearean poetry in particular--but whose province is the author's whole experience of the twentieth century.