In his "New Year Letter" of 1 January 1940 W. H. Auden cites "The far interior of our fate / To civilize and to create". During his lifetime (1970-73) Auden explore this far interior in a highly civilized and creative manner: in the socially conscious poems and plays of the 1930s, in the Christian poems of the 1940s, in the meditative work of the 1950s, in the domestic poems of the 1960s, in the reflective poems of his final years. In this symposium...