September 1 1939

<p><strong>One poet his poem New York City and a world on the verge of change.</strong><br/><br/>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>