Translated from the Danish by Walter Lowrie, David Swenson, and Alexander Dru
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard is one of the master thinkers of the modern age, a defining influence on existentialism and on twentieth-century theology, and this brilliantly tailored selection from his vast and varied writings—made by the great English poet W.H Auden—is a perfect introduction to his work. Auden’s inspired and incisive response to a thinker who had done much to shape his own beliefs is a fundamental reading of an author whose spirit remains as radical as ever more than 150 years after he wrote.
W. H. Auden has selected and arranged the essence of Kierkegaard's thought from:
The Journals
Either/Or
Repetition
Fear and Trembling
Philosophical Fragments
The Concept of Dread
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
The Present Age
The Works of love
Two Minor Ethico-Religious Treatises
The Sickness Unto Death
Training in Christianity
Auden accepted many assignments in his industrious life and always made something creative of them. The Living Thoughts of Søren Kierkegaard is more than an anthology, it is a bold reshaping of the Dane's oeuvre and the handiest introduction to him as a Christian apologist. Auden's compressed and jauntily dogmatic introduction is itself an education.
— John Updike
