Octavo. (28)ff., loose sheets. Twenty-six hand-colored etchings by Robert Andrew Parker, plus title-sheet and colophon illustrations, accompany Auden's wartime alphabet of aeronautical terminology. Auden's verses oscillate between feelings of heroism and of lament, mirroring his own struggle with the guilt of remaining a civilian observer to the horrors of war (for Auden, specifically, the Spanish Civil War and World War II). In a letter to E. R. Dodds at the beginning of the former, Auden described the particular difficulty non-combatancy posed to the true poet, who was impelled to write or at least know about the political urgencies of the day but who remained removed from the direct scene: "It is possible that in some periods, the poet can absorb and feel all in his ordinary everyday life...but for the second order and particularly to-day, what the poet knows, what he can write about is what he has experienced in his own person. Academic knowledge is not enough." Note, for example, his awe and dread for the engine's mechanical possibilities when he deems it "darling of designers and dirty dragon and revolving roarer," and his thinly veiled grief for the victim, "corpse after crash and carried through country and atonement for aircraft."

Sheets brilliantly clean and interleaved with protective leaves as issued. Held in clamshell box with onlaid leather at spine, gilt-titled. Fine. This set extremely rare, issued five years before the portfolio published by the Connecticut Graphic Arts Center. Unrecorded in OCLC.