Auden’s poems have always investigated the ill malaise of Modern Society, his approach to this certain theme has usually been through the assessment of inner motives and conflicts. Auden is a consistent student of the inner life, of nervousness, fright, culpability, love, self doubt, and suffering; he thought our inner lives could only be put right if community changes happened.    His work was inclined to make the outer world symbolic of an inner actuality.  As scholarly as Auden’s poetry is, it seems unconcerned, disconnected, and unfriendly.  The center of his poetry is the inner man thinking, feeling, comparing, cleansing, contemptuous, skeptical, and believing (Wright, 17-19).

The most academic and correct editions of Wystan’s poetry are as follows: Collected Poems, The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Essays, 1927-1939, Plays and other Dramatic Writings, 1928- 1938, Collected Poems 1976 (Bahlke, xi). There are many more works that were principle works in Auden’s life: About the House, written in 1965, The Age of Anxiety written in 1947, Homage to Clio in 1960, The Orators in 1932 and Secondary Worlds written 1968 (Brophy, 47).   

Most good criticism of Auden is up to date, because during the superior part of his thirty-five years of reputation as a poet, Auden has been abnormally inopportune in the treatment that has accorded him by critics.  At the beginning of his career he was welcomed with open arms and an excess of praise; he was acknowledged as the principal of a “group” with a politically opinionated program, as a “poetic messiah” who would show the way out of the “waste land”( Spears, 1-2).  When the politically associated critics saw that he was not what they thought he was or what they wanted him to be, the response was embittered; and it became worse when he immigrated to the United States and began his pursuit to write poetry beleaguered with religious connotations.  There was a lot of bitterness and resentment in Auden as a mislaid leader was an understandable reason (Spears 1-3).