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Creator
Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907-1973
Call number
Berg Coll 29967
Physical description
.1 linear feet ( 1 folder)
Preferred Citation
Words and the Word (Sermon) : typescript with holograph revisions, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library
Repository
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Access to materials
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Typescript sermon (3 pages), with holograph revisions in ink, by the Anglo-American poet and writer W. H. Auden (1907-1973). Auden delivered this sermon during the Evensong service of October 24, 1965 at Christ Church, Oxford, at the invitation of College Chaplain John Gilling. Auden used the same title for one of four lectures given in memory of T. S. Eliot at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in October 1967. The sermon explores the nature of human speech as a reflection of Divine activity. The lecture incorporates some of the themes and text present in this sermon

Administrative information

Source of acquisition

Purchased from Helena Kojevnikov, 2019

Note

The title "Words & the Word" is written in pencil in a different hand at top; the name W. H. Auden is written next to it in ink

;

A holograph revision in the typescript's final paragraph lacks the published quotation "The great advantage of the French language...."

Bibliography

The sermon is published under the title "Words and the Word" in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson, vol. 5, Prose: 1963-1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 404-407. The delivery of the sermon is identified and dated in the editor's introduction to the work. The lecture by the same title is also found in vol. 5, pp. 308-324, part IV of Auden's T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, published together under the title "Secondary Worlds."

Using the collection

Location

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788
Third Floor, Room 320