These are the contributing forces underlying Ian Sansomâs work excavating the man and his most celebrated piece of literature. But Sansomâs book is also about New York City: an island, an emblem of the Future, magnificent, provisional, seamy, and in 1939âabout to emerge as the defining twentieth-century cosmopolis, the capital of the world.
And so it is also about a world at a point of changeâabout 1939, and about our own Age of Anxiety, about the aftermath of September 11, when many American newspapers reprinted Audenâs poem in its entirety on their editorial pages.
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.
Ian Sansom is the author of 10 books of fiction and non-fiction. He is a former Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a former Writer-in-Residence at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast. He is currently a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 3 and he writes for The Guardian and The London Review of Books.