September 1, 1939: W. H. Auden and the Afterlife of a Poem - Softcover

Sansom, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 000755723X ISBN 13: 9780007557233

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2020

Synopsis

This 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 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.

About this title

Review:

Praise for ‘Paper’:

‘Engaging and dynamic’ Andrew Martin, Financial Times

‘Wonderfully diverting...Splendidly dense with fact and thought’ Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement

‘Sansom’s scholarship is prodigious; his enthusiasm inexhaustible...He can make one laugh out loud by his placing of a single word’ Daily Telegraph

‘A collection of ever so erudite, witty, chucklesome essays, rich with digressions and asides, on paper, in many of its guises, that seeks to refute – and does refute – the idea that we are moving towards a paperless world’ Bookmunch

About the Author:

Ian Sansom reviews regularly for the Guardian and the London Review of Books. His first book, The Truth About Babies, was published by Granta in 2002.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 000755723X
• ISBN 13: 9780007557233
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352