This scholarly book is the history of Auden's poems, and of the events that went into them, from the time he moved to America in 1939 until his death in Austria in 1973. It completes the study begun by Professor Mendelson in his standard Early Auden. Later Auden links the changes in Auden's intellectual, religious and domestic life with his shifting public roles - as representative of political causes, as a researcher working for the army in post-war Germany, as public moralist, lecturer and teacher, and above all as poet and thinker.