The Dyer´s Hand

In the early 1950s Auden began planning a prose volume that would bring together some of his published essays, lectures, and reviews, together with newly-written notes and aphorisms. In 1956 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and The Dyer´s Hand appeared in 1962, combining earlier material with revised versions of many of his Oxford lectures: ´Making, Knowing and Judging,´ ´The Prince´s Dog,´ ´Brothers & Others´, ´The Joker in the Pack´, ´D. H. Lawrence,´ ´Marianne Moore,´ ´Robert Frost,´ ´Byron´s Don Juan, ´Dingley Dell & The Fleet,´ ´Genius & Apostle´, ´Translating Opera Libretti´, and ´Music in Shakespeare´. The result is one of Auden´s most original works, his only book of prose devised as a single cohesive work about disparate subjects, and containing - as he remarked at the time - ´all the autobiography I am willing to make public´.