One poet, his poem, New York City, and a world on the verge of change.
W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality, became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left. And his poem, &;September 1, 1939,&; was his most famous and celebrated, yet one which he tried to rewrite and disown and which has enjoyed&;or been condemned&;to a tragic and unexpected afterlife.
These are the contributing forces underlying Ian Sansom&;s work excavating the man and his most celebrated piece of literature. But Sansom&;s book is also about New York City: an island, an emblem of the Future, magnificent, provisional, seamy, and in 1939&;about to emerge as the defining twentieth-century cosmopolis, the capital of the world.
And so it is also about a world at a point of change&;about 1939, and about our own Age of Anxiety, about the aftermath of September 11, when many American newspapers reprinted Auden&;s poem in its entirety on their editorial pages.
More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, this is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.
