The Orators included (and still does) prose poems, graphics, list poems and journal entries. The English Auden, which was subtitled Poems, Essays & Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939 felt like a subversive text when my friend enthused about it, prompting me to buy my own copy. But before too long a good friend of mine would prompt a return to Auden’s writing. cummings, Peter Redgrove and Adrian Mitchell. Well-thumbed by others, not by me, as I was busy chasing what at the time seemed like more exciting and innovative work by the likes of Robert Creeley, Kenneth Patchen, e.e. Thank You, Fog , whose laconic ‘final poems’ I am still very fond of, especially the title poem, was later joined on my shelves by a well-thumbed copy of Faber’s 1979 Selected Poems. For me, apart from the odd poem in school textbooks, it was buying a hardback copy of his final book, Thank You, Fog, in a remainder bookshop on Oxford Street, where it kept company with copies of Slow Dancer magazine, and poetry books by Brian Patten and Francis Berry (all of which I also purchased). And a lot of people know he moved to the USA in 1940 and later joined the Episcopal church there.Įveryone knows something about or by Auden, and everyone had a different route into his work. Everybody knows he was gay, and that he was a 1930s poet who was part of an outspoken and militant group of writers responding to what Auden, in his poem ‘1st September, 1939’, called ‘a low dishonest decade’, where ‘Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth’. There’s ‘Night Mail’ and its train rhythms written for an Associated British Picture Corporation film about the GPO back in 1936 what’s often known as ‘Funeral Blues’, movingly declaimed by John Hannah in Four Weddings and a Funeral perhaps ‘Musée de Beaux Arts’ (‘About suffering they were never wrong’) or the untitled poem which begins ‘Lay your sleeping head my love’.Įverybody knows what Auden looked like in old age, too: a man with a wonderful craggy landscape of a face, often with a cigarette in his hand, usually dressed in a crumpled suit.
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