September 1 1939

This is a book about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.

This is a book about a poet – W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left.

About a poem – ‘September 1, 1939’, 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.

About a city – New York, 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 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.

• Author  -  Ian Sansom
• Series / Key Character  -  n/a
• Illustrated  -  No
• Age -  Adult
• ISBN  -  9780007557219
• Publisher  -  4th Estate
• Date  -  2019
• Format  -  Hardback
• Weight  -  465g
• Size  -  22 x 14 cm
  
• Pages  -  342
• RRP  -  £16.99

Awards:  None