This book is the history of Auden's poems, and of the private and public events that went into them, from the time he moved from England to America in 1939 until his death in 1973. It completes the story begun in Edward Mendelson's Early Auden, and is even more revelatory about Auden's thought, life, and work. Later Auden links the many changes in Auden's intellectual, emotional, religious, and erotic life with his shifting public role as a representative of political causes, as a uniformed researcher working with the U.S. Army in postwar Germany, as a public moralist, and above all as a poet.