Description
| Product ID: | 9780007557233 |
| Product Form: | Paperback / softback |
| Country of Manufacture: | GB |
| Title: | September 1, 1939 |
| Subtitle: | W. H. Auden and the Afterlife of a Poem |
| Authors: | Author: Ian Sansom |
| Page Count: | 352 |
| Subjects: | Literary studies: poetry and poets, Literary studies: poetry & poets, History of ideas, History of ideas, United Kingdom, Great Britain, New York, English, c 1918 to c 1939 (Inter-war period), 21st century |
| Description: | 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, 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. |
| Imprint Name: | Fourth Estate Ltd |
| Publisher Name: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Country of Publication: | GB |
| Publishing Date: | 2020-08-20 |
