Editing W. H. Auden (section)

====Up to 1930====
[[File:Poems1928.jpg|upright|thumb|Cover of the privately printed ''[[Poems (Auden)|Poems]]'' (1928)]]
Auden began writing poems in 1922, at 15, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, especially [[Wordsworth]], and later poets with rural interests, especially [[Thomas Hardy]]. At 18 he discovered [[T. S. Eliot|T.&nbsp;S. Eliot]] and adopted an extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his own voice at 20 when he wrote the first poem later included in his collected work, "From the very first coming down".<ref name="EarlyNoPage"/> This and other poems of the late 1920s tended to be in a clipped, elusive style that alluded to, but did not directly state, their themes of loneliness and loss. Twenty of these poems appeared in his first book ''[[Poems (Auden)|Poems]]'' (1928), a pamphlet hand-printed by [[Stephen Spender]].<ref>{{cite book
| last = Auden
| first = W. H.
| editor-first = Katherine
| editor-last = Bucknell
| title = Juvenilia: Poems, 1922–1928
| publisher = Princeton University Press
| location = Princeton
| year = 1994
| isbn = 978-0-691-03415-7
| url = https://archive.org/details/juveniliapoems1900aude
}}</ref>

In 1928 he wrote his first dramatic work, ''[[Paid on Both Sides]]'', subtitled "A Charade", which combined style and content from the Icelandic [[sagas]] with jokes from English school life. This mixture of tragedy and farce, with a dream play-within-a-play, introduced the mixed styles and content of much of his later work.<ref name="FullerNoPage"/> This drama and thirty short poems appeared in his first published book ''[[Poems (Auden)|Poems]]'' (1930, 2nd edition with seven poems replaced, 1933); the poems in the book were mostly lyrical and gnomic meditations on hoped-for or unconsummated love and on themes of personal, social, and seasonal renewal; among these poems were "It was Easter as I walked", "Doom is dark", "Sir, no man's enemy", and "This lunar beauty".<ref name="EarlyNoPage"/>

A recurrent theme in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts", Auden's term for the powerful, unseen psychological effects of preceding generations on any individual life (and the title of a poem). A parallel theme, present throughout his work, is the contrast between biological evolution (unchosen and involuntary) and the psychological evolution of cultures and individuals (voluntary and deliberate even in its subconscious aspects).<ref name="FullerNoPage"/><ref name="EarlyNoPage"/>