About the House
About the House is a book of poems by W. H. Auden, published in 1965 by Random House (first published in England by Faber & Faber in 1966).
The book is in two unnumbered parts, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat", a sequence of poems about Auden's house in Kirchstetten, Austria, and a miscellaneous group of poems headed "In and Out". Almost all the poems were written between 1960 and 1964.
The "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" sequence includes 15 poems in different forms, some followed by a "Postscript" generally in haiku form. The sequence includes, among other poems, "The Cave of Making", "The Geography of the House", "Tonight at Seven-Thirty", "The Cave of Nakedness", and "The Common Life". One poem in the sequence, "Grub First, Then Ethics", was written in 1958 and was published in Auden's previous book Homage to Clio under the title "On Installing an American Kitchen in Lower Austria".
The poems in the "In and Out" section include "A Change of Air", "You", "Et in Arcadia Ego", "On the Circuit", "After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics", and "Whitsunday in Kirchstetten".
This was the first of Auden's books to include the haiku form, which he used in many poems for the rest of his career.
The book is dedicated to Edmund and Elena Wilson.
References
- John Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary (1999)
- Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (1999)
- v
- t
- e
- Poems (1930)
- The Orators (1932)
- On This Island (1936)
- Another Time (1940)
- The Double Man (1941)
- For the Time Being (1944)
- The Age of Anxiety (1947)
- Nones (1951)
- The Shield of Achilles (1955)
- Homage to Clio (1960)
- About the House (1966)
- City Without Walls (1969)
- Academic Graffiti (1971)
- Epistle to a Godson (1972)
- Thank You, Fog (1974)
prose and verse
- Letters from Iceland (1937, with Louis MacNeice)
- Journey to a War (1939, with Christopher Isherwood)
and other books
- The Enchafèd Flood (1950)
- The Dyer's Hand (1962)
- Secondary Worlds (1968)
- A Certain World (1970)
- Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
- "The Orators" (1932)
- "Funeral Blues" (1936)
- "Spain" (1937)
- "Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938)
- "Refugee Blues" (1939)
- "September 1, 1939" (1939)
- "The Unknown Citizen" (1939)
- "Hymn to St. Cecilia" (1940)
- "For the Time Being" (1944)
- "The Sea and the Mirror" (1944)
- "The Age of Anxiety" (1947)
- "In Praise of Limestone" (1948)
- "The Platonic Blow" (1948)
- "Horae Canonicae" (1949–55)
- "Bucolics" (1952–53)
- "The Shield of Achilles" (1955)
- Paid on Both Sides (1928)
- The Dance of Death (1933)
- The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935)
- The Ascent of F6 (1936)
- On the Frontier (1938)
- Play of Daniel (1958)
- Paul Bunyan (1941)
- The Rake's Progress (1951)
- Elegy for Young Lovers (1961)
- The Bassarids (1966)
- Love's Labour's Lost (1973)
- Night Mail (1936)
- George Augustus Auden (father)
- John Bicknell Auden (brother)
- John Auden (first cousin)
- Chester Kallman (companion)