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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| 0:49.6 | Hello, W.H. Auden 1907 to 1973 was a poet of Englishness in crisis of threat and fear in the 1930s which he called a low dishonest decade. |
| 1:00.0 | The son of a doctor and a missionary nurse, he was drawn to diagnose his country's sickness and |
| 1:05.1 | humanities weaknesses informed by his travels through the Weimar, Berlin, the Spanish Civil War and |
| 1:10.9 | the Sino-Japanese War. |
| 1:13.0 | It was also a decade he spent searching for romantic love, leading to his relationship with |
| 1:16.9 | Chester Kalman and American poet, for whom he moved to New York as the war he'd expected began. |
| 1:22.6 | We'd me to discuss Ordin and his poetry in the 1930s are. |
| 1:26.3 | Janet Montefiore, Professor Emerita of 20th century English Literature at the University of |
| 1:30.6 | Kent. |
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