Editing W. H. Auden (section)

===Later work, 1958–1973===
[[File:Auden1970ByPeter.jpg|thumb|upright|Auden in 1970]]
In the late 1950s Auden's style became less rhetorical while its range of styles increased. In 1958, having moved his summer home from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno"; other poems from this period include "Dichtung und Wahrheit: An Unwritten Poem", a prose poem about the relation between love and personal and poetic language, and the contrasting "Dame Kind", about the anonymous impersonal reproductive instinct. These and other poems, including his 1955–66 poems about history, appeared in ''[[Homage to Clio]]'' (1960).<ref name="FullerNoPage"/><ref name="LaterNoPage"/> His prose book ''[[The Dyer's Hand]]'' (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956–61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s.<ref name="LaterNoPage"/>

Among the new styles and forms in Auden's later work were the [[haiku]] and [[tanka]] that he began writing after translating the haiku and other verse in [[Dag Hammarskjöld]]'s ''Markings''.<ref name="LaterNoPage"/> A sequence of fifteen poems about his house in Austria, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" (written in various styles that included an imitation of [[William Carlos Williams]]) appeared in ''[[About the House]]'' (1965), together with other poems that included his reflection on his lecture tours, "On the Circuit".<ref name="FullerNoPage"/> In the late 1960s he wrote some of his most vigorous poems, including "River Profile" and two poems that looked back over his life, "Prologue at Sixty" and "Forty Years On". All these appeared in ''[[City Without Walls]]'' (1969). His lifelong passion for Icelandic legend culminated in his verse translation of ''The [[Elder Edda]]'' (1969).<ref name="FullerNoPage"/><ref name="LaterNoPage"/> Among his later themes was the "religionless Christianity" he learned partly from [[Dietrich Bonhoeffer]], the dedicatee of his poem "Friday's Child".<ref>{{cite book
| last = Kirsch
| first = Arthur
| title = Auden and Christianity
| publisher = Yale University Press
| location = New Haven
| year = 2005
| isbn = 978-0-300-10814-9
}}</ref>

<!-- He was commissioned in 1963 to write lyrics for the Broadway musical ''[[Man of La Mancha]]'', but the producer rejected them as insufficiently romantic.<ref name="Libretti"/> In 1971, Secretary-General of the United Nations [[U Thant]] commissioned Auden to write the words, and [[Pablo Casals]] to compose the music, for a "Hymn to the United Nations", but the work had no official status.<ref>{{ cite web
 | title = United Nations – Fact Sheet # 9: "Does the UN have a hymn or national anthem?
 | url = http://www.un.org/geninfo/faq/factsheets/hymn.pdf
 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20090325001921/http://www.un.org/geninfo/faq/factsheets/hymn.pdf
 | archive-date = 25 March 2009
| access-date = 26 May 2013 }}</ref>
-->
''[[A Certain World]]: A Commonplace Book'' (1970) was a kind of self-portrait made up of favourite quotations with commentary, arranged in alphabetical order by subject.<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HCQkCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA50|page=50|title=W.H. Auden Encyclopedia|author=David Garrett Izzo|publisher=McFarland|date= 28 February 2004|isbn=9780786479993}}</ref> His last prose book was a selection of essays and reviews, ''Forewords and Afterwords'' (1973).<ref name="CarpenterNoPage"/> His last books of verse, ''[[Epistle to a Godson]]'' (1972) and the unfinished ''[[Thank You, Fog]]'' (published posthumously, 1974) include reflective poems about language ("Natural Linguistics", "Aubade"), philosophy and science ("No, Plato, No", "Unpredictable but Providential"), and his own aging ("A New Year Greeting", "Talking to Myself"—which he dedicated to his friend [[Oliver Sacks]],<ref>{{cite magazine |url=https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/swimming-with-oliver-sacks |title=Swimming With Oliver Sacks |magazine=The New Yorker |access-date=January 5, 2016}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://tribrach.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/the-poem-that-w-h-auden-dedicated-to-oliver-sacks/ |title=The poem that W.H. Auden dedicated to Oliver Sacks |website=Tribrach |date=9 January 2016 |access-date=January 9, 2016}}</ref> "A Lullaby" ["The din of work is subdued"]). His last completed poem was "Archaeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later years.<ref name="LaterNoPage"/>