Letters from Iceland

In the summer of 1936 W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice visited Iceland on commission to write a travel book but found themselves capturing concerns on a scale that were far more international. 'Though writing in a holiday spirit' commented Auden 'its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment Hitler growing everyday more powerful and a world-war more inevitable.' The result is the remarkable <i>Letters from Iceland</i> a collaboration in poetry and prose reportage and correspondence published in 1937 with the Spanish Civil War newly in progress beneath the shadow of looming world war.