September 1, 1939 A Biography of a Poem

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.

In this deeply personal and brilliantly funny exploration, Ian Sansom unpacks the life of a single poem:

• A Biography of a Poem: Follow the strange journey of Auden’s most famous work—from its creation on the eve of war to the poet’s own attempts to erase it from history.
• New York City on the Brink: Explore the bars, streets, and anxieties of Manhattan in 1939, a city about to become the capital of the twentieth century.
• A Writer’s Obsession: Dive into author Ian Sansom’s own witty, self-deprecating, and decades-long struggle to understand one of modern literature’s most enduring and controversial poems.
• From 1939 to 9/11: Discover how a poem about the start of World War II found a tragic new resonance in the twenty-first century, becoming a talisman for a new generation grappling with crisis.