Auden

19 Dec, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures

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.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Mark Ford 4 episodes
    Poet and Professor of English at University College London
  • Janet Montefiore No other episodes
    Professor Emerita of 20th Century English Literature at the University of Kent
  • Jeremy Noel-Tod 2 episodes
    Senior Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia

Reading list

  • Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957
    W.H. Auden (Faber & Faber, 2003) Google Books →
  • Collected Longer Poems
    W.H. Auden (Random House, 2002) Google Books →
  • Selected Poems: revised edition
    W.H. Auden (ed. Edward Mendelson) (Faber and Faber, 2007) Google Books →
  • W.H. Auden: Poems selected by John Fuller
    W.H. Auden (ed. John Fuller) (Faber and Faber, 2009) Google Books →
  • Lectures on Shakespeare
    W.H. Auden (ed. Arthur Kirsch) (Princeton University Press, 2019) Google Books →
  • The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse: Volume I. 1926-1938
    W.H. Auden (ed. Edward Mendelson) (Princeton University Press, 1997) Google Books →
  • The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose: Volume II, 1939-1948
    W.H. Auden (ed. Edward Mendelson) (Princeton University Press, 2002) Google Books →
  • The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose: 1949-1955
    W.H. Auden (ed. Edward Mendelson) (Princeton University Press, 2008) Google Books →
  • The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose: Volume IV, 1956-1962
    W.H. Auden (ed. Edward Mendelson) (Princeton University Press, 2010) Google Books →
  • The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose: Volume V, 1963-1968
    W.H. Auden (ed. Edward Mendelson) (Princeton University Press, 2015) Google Books →
  • W. H. Auden Collected Poems
    W.H. Auden (ed. Edward Mendelson) (Random House, 1976) Google Books →
  • W.H.Auden: A Commentary
    John Fuller (Faber and Faber, 2007) Google Books →
  • The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s
    Samuel Hynes (Pimlico, 1992) Google Books →
  • Early Auden
    Edward Mendelson (Faber and Faber, 1999) Google Books →
  • Later Auden
    Edward Mendelson (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000) Google Books →
  • The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939
    Edward Mendelson (Faber and Faber, 2001)
  • September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem
    Ian Sansom (Fourth Estate, 2019) Google Books →
  • W.H.Auden in Context
    Tony Sharpe (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books →

Related episodes

Programme ID: m000cc0r

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000cc0r

Auto-category: 821.912 (English poetry–20th century–1945-1999–History and criticism)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. WH 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.