Letters from Iceland
Author(s): W. H. Auden
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 Letters from Iceland, 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.
Product Information
W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907, and brought up in Birmingham. His first book, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber in 1930. He went to Spain during the civil war, to Iceland and later travelled to China. In 1939 he and Christopher Isherwood left for America, where Auden spent the next fifteen years lecturing, reviewing, writing poetry and opera librettos, and editing anthologies. In 1956 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He died in Vienna in 1973.Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907. His first book of poems, Blind Fireworks, appeared in 1929, and he subsequently worked as a translator, literary critic, playwright, autobiographer, BBC producer and feature writer. The Burning Perch, his last volume of poems, appeared shortly before his death in 1963.
General Fields
- :
- : Faber & Faber, Limited
- : Faber & Faber, Limited
- : 0.345
- : 31 July 2013
- : 198mm X 126mm
- : books
Special Fields
- : W. H. Auden
- : Paperback
- : 256