Word: auden
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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LETTERS FROM ICELAND-W. H. Auden & Louis MacNeice-Random House...
...summer of 1936 young English Poet Wystan Hugh Auden got a publisher's advance for a trip to Iceland, "to write a book." Forthwith he asked young Irish Poet Louis MacNeice to come along. For several months the two poets toured the fishy, subArctic, volcanic island, sat around in its corrugated-iron farmhouses and dumpish hotels. When their time was up they had written a number of letters in prose and verse, collected a farrago of literate jottings about Iceland's history, culture, landscape, people. These, illustrated by photographs and stitched loosely together into a book, give...
Less capable of high jinks, less disposed to trifle with ideas of doom, Poet Auden throughout his travels takes an English Gentleman's slightly proprietary interest in good nature and good sense wherever he may find them. Among the Icelanders he finds considerable good nature and a general sanity too unmitigated to be of much current use to a loyal inhabitant of contemporary Europe. But Poet Auden is not so loyal to Europe as to deny the notion-suggested by the sight of Icelanders clumsily gallivanting at a country fair-that plain human nature is the essential thing...
Englishman Auden, however, does not allow such a lump of purely democratic emotion to stick in his throat for long. He clears it out with an elaborate, witty, rhymed, five-part letter to hyper-aristocratic English Poet Lord Byron. In this sophisticated, not entirely mock-serious composition, Poet Auden confides his thoughts about English literature in general, about his own life and times in particular, points a pretty straight finger at the hot spot on which up-to-the-minute literates fry perforce. His view of his fellow poets is neither encouraging nor hopeless : . . . many are in tears...
...furtherance of "something new" Poets Auden and MacNeice wind up their book by collaborating on a unique Last Will and Testament in which they tell their contemporaries what they think of them by means of appropriate bequests. To the Church of England they leave, among other things, "the Chief Scout's horn, a secondhand curate's font;" to bicycle, the and a English portable Public Schools, "mens sana qui mal y pense;" to Sir string;" to Robert square-headed Baden-Powell, pegs "a living piece in of the world's round holes, "our cheerfulness...