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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor-of-the-spectator, and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Ian Sansom, a regular critic for our pages, and as it turns out, a great authority on W.H. Orden.

I don't know if the word great authority is.

Which he already disclaimed.

Let's put it this way.

Ian has spent 25 years or so utterly immersed in Orden and Ordniana.

And his new book, which is the result of all this, is called September 1st, 1939, biography of a poem.

So he spent 25 years studying Auden and has now written a book about one of these poems what's that about yes well i mean it was my intention to write a massive book about allden's life and work and then over the years my ambit that was my ambition

and then i realized what my actual grasp might be rather than my reach, and it ended up as just that one.

And it just seemed, what seemed possible 25 years ago, I realized a few years ago I was going to have to scale down my ambitions.

And also, obviously, because there's the anniversary coming up 80 years since its first publication,

I thought, well, now is the time to

turn all of this apparently pointless effort to some, you know, to some consequence.

Anniversary aside, why this one poem, one of the things that will strike, you know, most

readers is, okay, W.H. Orden didn't like this poem of his own.

And you, I think, are four lines in before we say, well, this is where the poem begins to go wrong.

But that's, but I, don't you think a poem, poems are fascinating, not because they're, like writers.

Writers aren't fascinating because they're consistently brilliant.

On the contrary, what is fascinating is the kind of intermittency of brilliant.

...