September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem

by Ian Sansom

One poet, his poem, New York City, and a world on the verge of change.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Genres: Poetry, History, Nonfiction, Books About Books, Literature, Literary Criticism, Memoir

352 pages, Hardcover

Published September 24, 2019

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

An extended wrestle with a single poem by someone who's been trying to write a book about Auden for 25 years, and by his own account considers this more a monument to his failure than anything like what he originally intended. Seriously, if you're finding NaNoWriMo too easy and fancy upping the difficulty setting, just read the opening chapters of this, the sheer despair not just at writing but having written a book, the awareness that publication still represents only the most faint and fleeting chance at immortality, the yawning chasm Sansom still knows exists between himself and a great like Auden. Not that acknowledging greatness precludes criticism; the second chapter is called 'Your Least Favourite Auden Poem?', and Sansom certainly isn't blind to the case against this poem or even Auden in general, "the great glittering generalities". Of course, in this particular instance even Auden himself wasn't blind to the failings; the poem's most famous line, "we must love one another or die", was amended, excised, ultimately suppressed along with the rest of the poem. And yet it persists, even Auden's stature no guarantee of a writer being remembered as he might prefer.

Early on, the book promises to dig into its subject in truly obsessive detail; it's page 82 before we get to the second of the poem's 99 lines. Alas, from that point things speed up considerably, a mere 20-30 pages per stanza, which on one level feels like a surrender, even if there's already a sense that the publisher is being extraordinarily patient. At the risk of stating the obvious, you will learn a lot about Auden by reading it - but more generally, about the impossibility of ever fully capturing a subject, about the ebbing of youthful hopes, about the tides of culture that can leave a once ubiquitous critic utterly unread while something written for another era entirely gets a new lease on life for the worst possible reasons. Also, more specifically, about Ian Sansom, always presenting himself as the unremarkable counterpart to the great man, yet doing it so well that the achievement becomes paradoxically remarkable, the nobody embarked on a damn fool project elevated to the status of modern Quixote, a man who for all his self-criticism (not to mention an admission of listening to Sleaford fucking Mods on repeat) I could hardly help loving as representative for the fundamental absurdity of it all.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good and self-deprecating you want to write the author a reassuring letter

[Mizloo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very unusual book about the most famous poem by WH Auden; a poem the poet seems to have disdained, by an author who is perhaps best described as eccentric.

There is a class of well-educated British men who, while making utterly self-effacing statements, manage to demonstrate a wide an deep familiarity with literature in the English language, among others. When they take pen in hand, the dry wit and acerbic commentary they produce tickles me immoderately.

Ian Sansom has apparently written a good many books across the 25 years when, having started out to write a biography of Auden, he progressively narrowed his focus until he wrote this entertainingly erudite analysis of one work by Auden; the delight is in the asides that follow a word or phrase in the poem down a rabbit hole of literary and historical minutia. His frequent meandering on the literary and intellectual chasms that separate his efforts from Auden's, manages to include trenchant commentary on famous writers who fall into said chasms.

I learned a lot, laughed out loud and came to dearly love Ian Sansom. And of course, also learned a great deal about a famous poem I had, quite honestly, never even heard of. win win win

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, this one took awhile to finish. (It took the author 25 years to write, so I feel okay with this.)

This is the second biography of a poem I've read -- the first was about Frost's "The Road Not Taken." This one is much less biography and much more memoir, really, and a sort of literary diarrhea in which Sansom spews out everything his brain has ever pondered while reading a single poem of Auden's. This is fine. This is good. It's actually quite enjoyable -- Sansom has a self-deprecating humor that, when juxtaposed to the high-falutin' literariness of the content, really shines -- so perhaps my choice of 'spew' and 'diarrhea' are a bit too harsh. But it's true -- there is just so much here that it's hard to process. You have to read slowly, because Sansom moves incredibly fast -- sometimes too fast, as I would have loved to have much more explication of that eighth stanza.

My mind works like this, too -- it moves too fast and covers huge gaps from a single springboard -- so it's reassuring to see someone else do this, too. It's always good to know you're not alone.

[Tom Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book. Reconnected me with Auden. This is more than a book about a poem. It’s a book about writers and writing and a passion for literature.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really wonderful book and I'd like to give the author a hug and tell him everything is going to be ok.

[Tony Lawrence]

This is a heady mix of; (1) biography (W H Auden hero worship); (2) personal memoir, with a big dose of self-deprecation and humble-bragging, and; (3) a primer for the famous eponymous poem. Sansom is more or less successful in these aspects, in descending order. I quite enjoyed the scholarly review of Auden’s oeuvre and a deeper-dive into nature of Wystan as a man, a poet, and an icon, and New York on the eve of WW2. However, I would have a liked a simpler straight review of the poem, maybe as an appendix! To understand the context at play here; Sansom has spent 25 years writing this book, so its a big thing for him, and he obviously feels unworthy, down-playing his skill and prowess as a writer a lot of times … it became a bit dull to be honest. However, there are enough sparks of humour to make me want to read his own fiction, but probably not to read more Auden. I’m probably not worthy ;)

[Lynne Weiss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, I really disliked this book when I first started reading it. It seemed ridiculous to write an entire book about the author's "least favorite Auden poem" and to spend so much time talking about how difficult the book was for him to write, but I kept reading (it's very hard for me to not finish a book I start) and over time I came to greatly admire the broad sweep of the analysis. I knew very little about Auden when I began the book, but a few of his poems have crossed my path lately, and I'm doing some research into the politics of the 1930s, so I was drawn to it. It's not a typical work of literary criticism, but draws on Auden's biography, the political climate of the times, and a word-by-word analysis as well as the author's own experience of Auden. I kept reading intriguing and amusing passages aloud to my husband and will recommend this to friends who enjoy poetry.

[Pinda Wang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should be conceived as a great source of interesting Auden trivia and literary references, "in which all serious readers of Auden will find something to value". But not literally an anatomy of the poem. All the talk about how "sitting" in the first stanza means "not standing" (p.64) is great, until you remember that Baldrick, in his ill-fated scramble to write a dictionary in "Blackadder", defined dog as "not a cat".

"One of the reasons to read Auden is to read what he's been reading," Ian Sansom wrote in the book, "Philip Larkin dismissed Auden's later work as 'a rambling intellectual stew' - but some of us are grateful for any source of nourishment, and the more in the stew the better". And so I read Sansom the same way he claims to read Auden.

[Noel Cisneros]

La biografía de un poema que es también la biografía de su autor. Conocemos a Auden y su mundo a través de este exhaustivo análisis, hecho con profunda erudición, pero también con profundo cariño. ¿Qué hace a un poema un poema? Se pregunta este autor ¿Y por qué September 1 1939 es un poema? Para contestar estas interrogantes Samson nos lleva al Nueva York en 1939 hasta York en 1907, hasta la Inglaterra contemporánea, pasando por Viena en 1973, por una isla Griega y por el Nueva York después de los atentados de 2001.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suppose this is no less useful as a work of literary criticism than most and the author is certainly more amiable company, but the degree to which it is loaded with mere information make it a wearying read. Its research is a mile wide and an inch deep and Sansom is unwilling, to a perverse degree, to draw any conclusions or defend any point of view. I should be more sympathetic, since these are my own failings, but I still wish it had been shorter by about a third.

[Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you're generally interested in poetry, or specifically interested in Auden's most famous poem, don't waste your time with this book as it may put you off the very poetry it's supposed to be about. Turgid to the point of being unreadable, with far more paragraphs about the author himself than about the subject of the title. At the very end the author admits that at times in his life he wanted to give up writing. I only wish he had.

[Marsha Valance · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We must love one another or die" -- Ian Sansom's analysi of W. H. Auden's poem demonstrates Auden's significance for our own time.

[Mae · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is intensely special

[Simon Barraclough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more scholarly and serious than the self-deprecating author allows. I love a long study of a short or single poem; there should be more.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve never been able to force myself to spend much time with Auden, but this is a fun and interesting book.