In this volume, W. H. Auden assembled, edited, and arranged the best of his prose writing, including the famous lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry.  The result is less a formal collection of essays than an extended and linked series of observations--on poetry, art, and the observation of life in general.  The Dyer's Hand is a surprisingly personal, intimate view of the author's mind, whose central focus is poetry--Shakespearean poetry in particular--but whose province is the author's whole experience of the twentieth century.