The dyer's hand - W. H Auden

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:
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'.

'Speaking for myself,
the questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The
first is technical: "Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?"
The second is, in the broadest sense, moral: "What kind of a guy
inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good
place? His notion of the Evil One? What does he conceal from the reader?
What does he conceal even from himself?" - W. H. Auden (inaugural
lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, June 1956)