Three Faces of WH Auden

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Michael Symmons Roberts sets out to consider three different aspects of Auden's poetry.

Fifty years on from the death of one of the 20th century's greatest poets, WH Auden, Michael Symmons Roberts sets out to consider three different aspects of his work.

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Three Faces of WH Auden: Episode 1

Episode 1

BBC Radio 4 - Three Faces of WH Auden, Episode 1

A major three part series on the poet WH Auden begins with a look at his political work.

Fifty years on from the death of one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, WH Auden, Michael Symmons Roberts begins a new three part series by looking at Auden’s political work.

It starts with that face - a wedding cake left out in the rain, as he himself described it. WH Auden was undoubtedly one of the greatest and most recognisable poets of the Twentieth Century, and one of the things that made him stand out was the strength of his work across different subjects. Most poets would be thrilled to be remembered for their love poetry, their metaphysical poetry, or their political poetry - Auden was an exceptional exponent of all three. 

In this new three-part series marking 50 years since Auden’s death, Michael Symmons Roberts sets out to consider those three different aspects of Auden’s massive body of work, beginning with a  look at the political poet who in his early years was perhaps the leading voice of the British cultural  left. 

As a young man in the 1930s Auden wrote powerful works such as ‘Spain’ that served as an ideological call to arms. Going on to witness the reality of battle in both Spain and China, he distanced himself from such poems and from the very idea that verse could make any practical political difference at all - “for poetry makes nothing happen” as he wrote in his elegy to W.B. Yeats.

Michael travels to Austria, where Auden spent his summers for the last fifteen years of his life and hears how the older poet remained politically active through helping writers in the Communist bloc in spite of this aversion to directly engaged verse. He also looks at those great poems of Auden’s later career, including ‘The Fall of Rome’, that offer a more mythological reading of political events than the works of the 1930s that made him such a dominant figure in the cultural landscape. 

Contributors include Alan Bennett, Katherine Bucknell, Carl Phillips, Zaffar Kunial, Timo Frühwirth, Sandra Mayer. 

Producer: Geoff Bird

Poems referenced in this episode include:
 
As I Walked Out One Evening
Spain
September 1st 1939
The Shield Of Achilles
The Fall Of Rome
Night Mail
Funeral Blues
 
All published by Faber & Faber

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