Editing W. H. Auden (section)

====1947–1957====
[[File:W. H. Auden (1956 press photo).jpg|thumb|upright|Auden in 1956]]

After completing ''The Age of Anxiety'' in 1946 he focused again on shorter poems, notably "A Walk After Dark", "The Love Feast", and "The Fall of Rome".<ref name="LaterNoPage"/> Many of these evoked the Italian village where he spent his summers between 1948 and 1957, and his next book, ''[[Nones (Auden)|Nones]]'' (1951), had a Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work.<ref name="Tony Sharpe 196">{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=U1QgAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA196|page=196|title=W. H. Auden in Context|first=Tony |last=Sharpe|publisher=Cambridge University Press|date= 21 January 2013 |isbn=9781139618922}}</ref> A new theme was the "sacred importance" of the human body<ref>{{cite book
 | last = Auden
 | first = W. H.
 | title = Forewords and Afterwords
 | publisher = Random House
 | year = 1973
 | location = New York
 | page = 68
 | isbn = 978-0-394-48359-7}}</ref> in its ordinary aspect (breathing, sleeping, eating) and the continuity with nature that the body made possible (in contrast to the division between humanity and nature that he had emphasised in the 1930s);<ref name="Tony Sharpe 196"/> his poems on these themes included "[[In Praise of Limestone]]" (1948) and "Memorial for the City" (1949).<ref name="FullerNoPage"/><ref name="LaterNoPage"/> In 1947-1948, Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto for [[Igor Stravinsky]]'s opera ''[[The Rake's Progress]]'', and later collaborated on two libretti for operas by [[Hans Werner Henze]].<ref name="CarpenterNoPage"/><ref name="Libretti"/>

Auden's first separate prose book was ''[[The Enchafèd Flood]]: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea'' (1950), based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature.<ref name="ProseTwo">{{cite book
| last = Auden
| first = W. H.
| editor-first =Edward
| editor-last = Mendelson
| editor-link=Edward Mendelson
| title = Prose, Volume II: 1939–1948
| publisher = Princeton University Press
| location = Princeton
| year = 2002
| isbn = 978-0-691-08935-5}}</ref> Between 1949 and 1954 he worked on a sequence of seven [[Good Friday]] poems, titled "[[Horae Canonicae]]", an encyclopaedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history, focused on the irreversible act of murder; the poem was also a study in cyclical and linear ideas of time. While writing this, he also wrote "[[Bucolics (Auden)|Bucolics]]", a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to nature. Both sequences appeared in his next book, ''[[The Shield of Achilles]]'' (1955), with other short poems, including the book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier".<ref name="FullerNoPage"/><ref name="LaterNoPage"/>

In 1955–56 Auden wrote a group of poems about "history", the term he used to mean the set of unique events made by human choices, as opposed to "nature", the set of involuntary events created by natural processes, statistics, and anonymous forces such as crowds. These poems included "T the Great", "The Maker", and the title poem of his next collection ''[[Homage to Clio]]'' (1960).<ref name="FullerNoPage"/><ref name="LaterNoPage"/>