New Year Letter

by W.H. Auden

Carta de Año Nuevo, el libro que acometió Auden tras sus primeras experiencias norteamericanas y el inicio de la segunda guerra mundial, supone el documento de un poeta estremecido por las noticias de una patria lejana, que escribe entre la convulsión y la incertidumbre: un intento de reinterpretar el mundo, la historia moderna y la cultura occidental desde el panorama sombrío de la guerra, un abandono del discurso político y una pregunta por la conciencia religiosa.

Genres: Poetry

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Poems, published in such collections as Look, Stranger! (1936) and The Shield of Achilles (1955), established importance of British-American writer and critic Wystan Hugh Auden in 20th-century literature.

In and near Birmingham, he developed in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent schools and studied at Christ church, Oxford. From 1927, Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship despite briefer but more intense relations with other men. Auden passed a few months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.

He then spent five years from 1930 to 1935, teaching in English schools and then traveled to Iceland and China for books about his journeys. People noted stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide attention at the age of 23 years in 1930 with his first book, Poems ; The Orators followed in 1932.

Three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 to 1938 built his reputation in a left-wing politics.

People best know this Anglo for love such as "Funeral Blues," for political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939," for culture and psychology, such as The Age of Anxiety , and for religion, such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." In 1939, partly to escape a liberal reputation, Auden moved to the United States. Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship to 1939. In 1939, Auden fell in lust with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage.

From 1941, Auden taught in universities. This relationship ended in 1941, when Chester Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship.

Auden taught in universities through 1945. His work, including the long For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror , in the 1940s focused on religious themes. He attained citizenship in 1946.

The title of his long The Age of Anxiety , a popular phrase, described the modern era; it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. From 1947, he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia. From 1947, Auden and Chester Kallman lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation and often collaborated on opera libretti, such as The Rake's Progress for music of Igor Stravinsky until death of Auden.

Occasional visiting professorships followed in the 1950s. From 1956, he served as professor at Oxford. He wintered in New York and summered in Ischia through 1957. From 1958, he wintered usually in New York and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.

He served as professor at Oxford to 1961; his popular lectures with students and faculty served as the basis of his prose The Dyer's Hand in 1962.

Auden, a prolific prose essayist, reviewed political, psychological and religious subjects, and worked at various times on documentary films, plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his controversial and influential career, views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as claim of Joseph Brodsky of his "greatest mind of the twentieth century."

He wintered in Oxford in 1972/1973 and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, until the end of his life.

After his death, films, broadcasts, and popular media enabled people to know and ton note much more widely "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," t

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written and published in the dark 1940/41 interval this classic series of couplets is but a sober query about a world going to hell. That alone struck me as appropriate for this wonderful morning, this mysterious new year with it’s cabbalistic distribution of twos and zeros. I would recommend reading the entire poem with haste, going through the end notes and then reading the poem again to reflect on Auden’s audacity, his ability to handle the western tradition with such ease as to invoke a definition of the divine: it all appears to be a child’s game in his deft control.

[Sebastian Uribe Díaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

El año trae a este planeta el miedo:
la democracia es un juguete viejo,
el mercader vocea su reclamo,
los pobres son dejados en las manos
de ingeniosos lacayos;los ancianos
ultrajan la verdad a latigazos,
los mansos van cayendo en las cunetas
con lápidas de mártires a cuestas
y la cultura, a cuatro patas, ladra
para una élite venal y aciaga
mientras en el canchal de los borregos
lloran sin pausa los patricios viejos.

-Pág. 157 de ‘Carta de Año Nuevo’ de W.H. Auden. Traducción de Gabriel Insausti.

Primero del año✌🏻

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

800 heroic couplets written off the cuff for a friend. Pompous, showy, and forced: I love his idiocies, I love his verse footnotes, which are as long as the original poem again and arraying all his beetling, piecemeal research into his age at least: cell biology, crank psychoanalysis, early sociology, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, all the arts and sciences nominally in his pocket. Anyway half of the idiocy is forced on him by the genre, epic verse, which always sounds damn silly to me (not that I mind silliness in my high art, but I do mind people being silly and not admitting it):

Tonight a scrambling decade ends,
And strangers, enemies and friends
Stand once more puzzled underneath
The signpost on the barren heath
Where the rough mountain track divides...

A weary Asia out of sight
Is tugging gently at the night,
Uncovering a restless race;
Clocks shoo the childhood from its face,
And accurate machines begin
To concentrate its adults in
A narrow day to exercise
Their gifts in some cramped enterprise.
How few pretend to like it: O,
Three quarters of these people know
Instinctively what ought to be
The nature of society
And how they'd live there if they could.
If it were easy to be good,
And cheap, and plain as evil, how
We all would be its members now...

How grandly would our virtues bloom
In a more conscionable dust
Where Freedom dwells because it must,
Necessity because it can,
And men confederate in Man.

But wishes are not horses, this
Annus is not mirabilis;
Day breaks upon the world we know
Of war and wastefulness and woe...

The New Year brings an earth afraid,
Democracy a ready-made
And noisy tradesman's slogan, and
The poor betrayed into the hand

Of lackeys with ideas, and truth
Whipped by their elders out of youth,
The peaceful fainting in their tracks
With martyrs' tombstones on their backs,
And culture on all fours to greet A butch and criminal elite,
While in the vale of silly sheep
Rheumatic old patricians weep...

One critic, screwing up all his strength, called Auden's bad style, which NYL is supposed to be an instance of, "snide bright jargon", which is a perfect compliment! (if you don't view limpid repetition of what every other sensitive outsider has said before you as poetry's point.) I've not read it alone on New Year's Eve like you ought to, but I will.

[Stephen Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Auden writes here as a man in need of Advent, and indeed as one of who is on the very cusp of apprehending the Incarnation. As he has watched the world run pell-mell back into the hell of global war, he is well aware that something must be done “about [the] common meditative norm, / Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform,” and with the guns of Autumn, 1939, he sees the Devil crouching at the door. However, one does not get the sense that he quite fully believes that the answer to the world’s madness is the euangelion. In “New Year Letter,” the Incarnation is yet for Auden what Eliot called “the hint half-guessed, the mystery half-understood.” But Auden will not stay in this state of half-belief, as “For the Time Being” will so readily demonstrate.

[Lily · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sing-songy bleak welcome of the new year, skewering modernity and calling on Western tradition, it doesn't quite glow, but I like the idea and is obviously well researched as the amassed footnotes show...

[Bohemian Book Lover · Rating 2 out of 5]

*Now that we've
*Entered & are
*Welcoming in a new

*Year (2026), I sense an
*Eerie
*Apprehension that it has eventful & challenging times in store. I began
*Reading the

*Long title poem days after Trump
*Extracted & deposed
*The president of Venezuela on
*The 3rd of January (& he's still determined to annex Greenland as well!) Coupled with the rising fears that
*Europe is preparing for war with
*Russia, things look as grim & uncertain as the year Auden wrote the 3-part "Letter" dedicated & addressed to his friend Elizabeth Mayer, pouring into it personal & collective anxieties, sociopolitical observations, feelings & philosophical reflections at the beginning of 1940.
Much of its heroic couplets went over my head, as I'm not a huge fan of book-length poems, especially when they rhyme. Even so, I did come across a good number of verses that impressed & stood out for me. I scanned through the many pages of notes where you'll find further poems, quotes and allusions in connection with certain lines of The Letter (a lot of them not really explicating much).
There's also a sequence of 20 sonnets (the 3rd one being too long to be a sonnet but it's still included as one) under the heading 'The Quest'. The title is self-explanatory enough, but the poems were too abstract & elusive to allude to who it was that was doing the questing & what was it they were questing for. Auden can be off putting when he's deliberately obscure, & yet intriguingly enigmatic. But I felt he was being too cerebral, cryptic & formal in this sequence, making it additionally difficult to relate to the poems.
The volume opens with a Prologue & concludes with an Epilogue (the only two poems that don't rhyme but follow a syllabic order/structure). The final stanza of the Epilogue borrows the symbolism of the opening verses of the Gospel of John, giving the last "Word" to Auden's budding Christian conversion & hope of "light" for the "darkness" growing with the outbreak of WW2.
The following extracted stanza from 'The Letter' represents my personal feelings at the beginning of 2026, which synchronistically mentions "horses" (it's the Chinese Year of the Horse):

"But wishes are not horses, this
Annus is not Mirabilis;
Day breaks upon the world we know
Of war and wastefulness and woe;
Ashamed civilians come to grief
In brotherhoods without belief,
Whose good intentions cannot cure
The actual evils they endure,
Nor smooth their practical career,
Nor bring the far horizon near.
The New Year brings an earth afraid,
Democracy a ready-made
And noisy tradesman’s slogan, and
The poor betrayed into the hand
Of lackeys with ideas, and truth
Whipped by their elders out of youth,
The peaceful fainting in their tracks
With martyrs’ tombstones on their backs,
And culture on all fours to greet
A butch and criminal élite,
While in the vale of silly sheep
Rheumatic old patricians weep."

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is a prodigious triumph of Auden's so called ‘middle style’ and perchance his greatest of the American Phase. This tome contains the 'Letter' and also the sonnet requence 'The Quest' with a 'Prologue' and 'Epilogue'. When you read the 'Letter', you’d be introduced to a long reflective poem in rhymed veto syllabics. My language instructors back in the day were in chorus when they’d say that the real appeal of ‘New Year Letter’ lies in the particular of the discourse and its odd relationship with the 'Notes' which follow. And boy O boy !! The 'Notes'???? This has been compared with Eliot's ‘Waste Land’. But if you ask me, personally, I’d tell you that these can be better compared with Pope's notes to ‘The Dunciad’, which are similarly deployed as contributively material. And now for the cherry on the pie, "The Quest"… These sonnets are the most important part of the work. To give coherence and unity to the multiple experiences, both physical and divine, of his questers --- the singular displaced man --- Auden has relied on a host of literary material with which his readers were likely to be familiar. In other words, he has used the well-known 'mythical technique', the technique, of finding objective correlatives for the present in the past mythical and it also sources, new development in Auden's technique and it other works of the period. If you are a sucker for poetry, do not let go of this tome.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lengthy, sprawling poem that is two-thirds endnotes. Written by Auden during WW2, it seems to be a way for him to work out the threats and philosophies of the time, and credit where it's due, the thing taken together is enormously impressive. The endnotes are the highlight, really, if one can refer to the bulk of any text as the highlight - they jump about from quotes to extracts to more poetry, a modernist reaching for meaning. But as much as I enjoyed the sheer gumption of the scope of New Year Letter, as poetry the best part of the actual verse ends when the prologue does. That prologue is astonishingly lovely - "none / are determined like the tiny brains who found / the great communities of summer: / only on battlefields". What follows is merely clever.

[Alejandro G. Barroso · Rating 4 out of 5]

1706 versos que debieran inscribirse en una columna virgen por un diestro orfebre, alrededor de la cual un templo debiera erigirse y guardar la miríada de libros que se necesitan para entender todas y cada una de sus referencias, y así terminar siendo el objeto distorsionado y borroso, como todo cuanto es relevante, al fondo de la cámara fotográfica de los miles de teléfonos móviles de una multitud de turistas ocasionales.

[Malola · Rating 2 out of 5]

No me llegó. (De ahí el tiempo que me costó terminarlo.) Fue cortito, así que lo terminé, porque.
No sé si me hubiesa gustado de haberlo leído en inglés. La continua mención de gente importante fue demasiado tosca y las referencias no fluían.
___________________________
Not my thing. (Hence how much it too me to finish it.) It was short, so, I went through it, because.
I don't know if I would have liked it in English. The name-dropping was too cramped, and the references weren't smooth.

[Derian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Muy sesudo para este pobre espíritu criado a base de cumbia villera y cámaras ocultas de videomatch. La mayoría de las referencias se me escapan y no logro empatía con ese yo lírico que la tiene re clara. Cada verso es de una perfección formal impresionante. Es como un largo poema demasiado limpito, demasiado pulcro. No va mucho conmigo.

[María Frutilla · Rating 2 out of 5]

zzzzzz...

[Sergio D. Lara · Rating 5 out of 5]

El poema es estupendo: poderoso, inteligente y profundamente conmovedor. La traducción es muy linda y se deja leer con facilidad. La edición es muy bonita, pero es una lástima que las notas al texto tengan tantas erratas.