In the early 1950s Auden began planning a prose volume that would bring together some of his published essays, lectures, and reviews, together with newly-written notes and aphorisms. In 1956 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and The Dyer's Hand appeared in 1962, combining earlier material with revised versions of many of his Oxford lectures: 'Making, Knowing and Judging,' 'The Prince's Dog,' 'Brothers & Others', 'The Joker in the Pack', 'D. H. Lawrence,' 'Marianne Moore,' 'Robert Frost,' 'Byron's Don Juan, 'Dingley Dell & The Fleet,' 'Genius & Apostle', 'Translating Opera Libretti', and 'Music in Shakespeare'. The result is one of Auden's most original works, his only book of prose devised as a single cohesive work about disparate subjects, and containing - as he remarked at the time - 'all the autobiography I am willing to make public'.

'Speaking for myself, the questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The first is technical: "Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?" The second is, in the broadest sense, moral: "What kind of a guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place? His notion of the Evil One? What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal even from himself?" - W. H. Auden (inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, June 1956)

'For something comparable to The Dyer's Hand in range and intensity of commitment, and for its inspired mingling of grandeur and informality, one would have to go back to Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.' Sunday Times

The present edition is based on the text in W. H. Auden, Prose, Volume IV, 1956-1962 (2010) edited by Edward Mendelson, which includes minor corrections that Auden made after The Dyer's Hand was first published.