Auden

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2019

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and poetry of WH Auden (1907-1973) up to his departure from Europe for the USA in 1939. As well as his personal life, he addressed suffering and confusion, and the moral issues that affected the wider public in the 1930s and tried to unpick what was going wrong in society and to understand those times. He witnessed the rise of totalitarianism in the austerity of that decade, travelling through Germany to Berlin, seeing Spain in the Civil War and China during its wars with Japan, often collaborating with Christopher Isherwood. In his lifetime his work attracted high praise and intense criticism, and has found new audiences in the fifty years since his death, sometimes taking literally what he meant ironically. With Mark Ford Poet and Professor of English at University College London Janet Montefiore Professor Emerita of 20th Century English Literature at the University of Kent And Jeremy Noel-Tod Senior Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:05.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:07.6	There's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our
0:11.0	programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time.
0:14.9	I hope you enjoyed the programs.
0:16.9	Hello, WHO, 1907-1973, was a poet of Englishness in crisis of threat and fear in the 1930s,
0:24.1	which he called a low dishonest decade.
0:27.2	The son of a doctor and a missionary nurse, he was drawn to diagnose his country's sickness
0:31.6	and humanity's weaknesses, informed by his travels through the by-marb, Berlin, the Spanish
0:36.6	Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War.
0:39.7	It was also a decade he spent searching for romantic love, leading to his relationship
0:43.4	with Chester Carmen and American poet, for whom he moved to New York as the war he'd
0:47.8	expected began.
0:48.8	We'd be to discuss ordnance and his poetry in the 1930s.
0:53.0	Janet Matapurre, Professor Emeritor of 20th Century English Literature at the University
0:57.2	of Kent.
0:58.2	Jerry Minotod, Senior Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of
1:02.4	East Anglia and Mark Ford, Poet and Professor of English at the University College London
1:06.9	and Mark Ford, what distinguished ordnance early does?
1:11.7	You mentioned that his father was a doctor and I think that's a kind of crucial aspect
1:15.6	of what gets called the ordnance and that is this diagnosis, again a phrase that you
1:21.6	used which his early poetry presents of England, somehow what he called this country where
	...

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