September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem

by Ian Sansom

Overview

One poet, his poem, New York City, and a world on the verge of change.

W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality, became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left. And his poem, “September 1, 1939,” was 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.

These are the contributing forces underlying Ian Sansom’s work excavating the man and his most celebrated piece of literature. But Sansom’s book is also about New York City: 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 so it is also 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.

More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, this is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062984609
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ian Sansom is the author of 10 books of fiction and non-fiction. He is a former Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a former Writer-in-Residence at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast. He is currently a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 3 and he writes for The Guardian and The London Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Wow! 1

Your Least Favourite Auden Poem? 15

Just a Title 30

I ≠ A 47

The Modern Poet 56

Not Standing 64

A Not Insignificant Americanism 74

A Rolling Tomato Gathers No Mayonnaise 82

Clever-Clever 91

Various Cosmic Thingummys 96

Offensive Smells 106

A Little Spank-Spank 115

Strangeways 127

Is Berlin Very Wicked? 133

Do Not Tell Other Writers to F*** Off 144

The Latin for the Judgin' 153

Aerodynamics 171

Get Rid of the (Expletive) Braille 176

Tower of Babel Time 185

The Liquid Menu 195

Below Average 205

Soft Furnishings 212

Talking Trash 221

You Can't Say 'Mad' Nijinsky 230

Homo Faber 241

As Our Great Poet Auden Said 257

We Must Die Anyway 268

Twinkling 277

A New Chapter in My Life 292

Twenty-Five Years' Worth of Reading 305

Editorial Reviews

Poetry lovers and readers intrigued by Auden and his considerable influence will have a rollicking time with this entertaining yet earnest tome.” — Booklist (starred review)

“September 1, 1939, the book, is a deeply informed and unapologetically digressive dive into Auden’s life, as well as into the life of this singular poem. Along the way, we readers hear a good deal of nattering about Sansom’s own life: how, for instance, his sister in Australia thinks he should buy a barbecue grill, or how he, unlike Auden, lasted only two weeks on a misbegotten pilgrimage to New York City. Sansom says of Auden, the poet, that he’s ‘a terrible fidget. It’s what makes [his] poems entertaining, and infuriating.’ Much the same can be said of Sansom, the fidgety critic.” — Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“[Sansom’s] richly entertaining book explores what goes on in the poem and why it has had such an impact.” — The Guardian

From the Publisher

Poetry lovers and readers intrigued by Auden and his considerable influence will have a rollicking time with this entertaining yet earnest tome.

Booklist (starred review)

Poetry lovers and readers intrigued by Auden and his considerable influence will have a rollicking time with this entertaining yet earnest tome.

Booklist (starred review)

September 1, 1939, the book, is a deeply informed and unapologetically digressive dive into Auden’s life, as well as into the life of this singular poem. Along the way, we readers hear a good deal of nattering about Sansom’s own life: how, for instance, his sister in Australia thinks he should buy a barbecue grill, or how he, unlike Auden, lasted only two weeks on a misbegotten pilgrimage to New York City. Sansom says of Auden, the poet, that he’s ‘a terrible fidget. It’s what makes [his] poems entertaining, and infuriating.’ Much the same can be said of Sansom, the fidgety critic.

Maureen Corrigan

[Sansom’s] richly entertaining book explores what goes on in the poem and why it has had such an impact.

The Guardian

2019-08-07
W.H. Auden's famous poem receives an impressionistic, idiosyncratic examination from fellow poet, mystery writer, and jack-of-all-literary trades Sansom (English/Univ. of Warwick; December Stories I, 2018, etc.).

Don't expect conventional literary criticism or an exegesis of the poem's historical and autobiographical underpinnings in this rambling, fitfully stimulating work. Structured as a stanza-by-stanza exploration, the text is in fact extremely scattershot; Sansom takes 100 pages to get through Auden's first stanza, leaving 200 breathless pages for the next eight. Indeed, the text generally has a breathless, tossed-off air, though the author tells us he has been trying to write about Auden for 25 years. The plethora of literary extracts scattered throughout, by Auden and others, might testify to Sansom's deep knowledge of literature—or might just signal an author substituting quotation for inspiration. He certainly knows a lot about Auden, and there are flashes of genuine perceptiveness: "that weird combination in [Auden's] work of mental toughness and piercing insights, and also a deep, sweet sentimentality." (Sansom takes a more jaundiced tone about Auden's sentimental tendencies when he gets to the poem's most famous line, "We must love one another or die," and dismisses it with a brisk, "No. Just, no.") Sansom never conveys the sense of personal connection that presumably led him to grapple with Auden and his work. Instead, we get uninteresting personal trivia, such as the author's feelings of inferiority to real Auden scholars like John Fuller and Edward Mendelson or the fact that he, like Auden, reads a lot of crime fiction. The latter remark is followed by the vague claim that "it's hard not to imagine Auden as some sort of detective…one of those professional amateurs beloved of crime writers." Whether a reader finds this sort of aperçu charming or not is a good forecast of what their overall reaction to the book will be.

Knowledgeable and occasionally insightful but also undisciplined and self-indulgent.

Kirkus Reviews