Auden's complete works are not yet collected and his papers and letters are divided among a number of libraries and private sources. Thanks to his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, the papers are in better order than those of many writers, and a project is currently underway to make his complete oeuvre available in thoroughly researched and accessible volumes. The most significant collection of Auden's manuscripts can be found in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Other important collections can be found at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Harvard Library and the British Library, London.

An extensive though incomplete bibliography compiled by B. C. Bloomfeld and Edward Mendelson, published in 1972, only goes through to 1969 (W. H. Auden: A Bibliography, 1924–1969. Second Edition). Mendelson’s supplement, bringing it up to 1983, has been published in Auden Studies I.

Auden published over twenty books of poems in his lifetime. The majority of the poems are republished in Collected Poems (1976; revised edition 1991). The volume is not however a Complete Poems, since it excludes some of his most famous, subsequently disavowed poems. The text reflects not the original published version, but Auden’s later revisions. For original versions, 1929–39, see The English Auden. Katherine Bucknell’s Juvenilia includes all of Auden’s known early poems (1922–8) and provides helpful bibliographical and textual comments. Edward Mendelson is general editor of the multivolume Complete Works of W. H. Auden, published by Princeton University Press (USA) and Faber and Faber (UK). W. H. Auden: Critical Editions form a subcategory of this series which, to date, includes an annotated version of Lectures on Shakespeare (2000) and The Sea and the Mirror (2003), both edited by Edward Kirsch. The former provides reconstructions of Auden’s Shakespeare lectures, delivered at the New School in 1946.