Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- Date Published: June, 2021
- ISBN: 978-1-953252-26-5
Excerpt
American Auden
in World War II and After
(with a Glance at Spender and MacNeice)
In April of 1945, W. H. Auden had just put on the uniform of a United States Army major to take part in a Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany. Because he spoke German and had lived in Germany for some time during the 1930s, the Pentagon felt his knowledge would be useful and had asked him to participate in an attempt to discover how American bombing had affected the morale and the lives of German civilians (as if such a thing could be in doubt). He had been in America since January 1939, when he arrived with his friend and collaborator, the novelist Christopher Isherwood. Louis MacNeice, Benjamin Britten, and Peter Pears soon followed, but by 1945 Isherwood was in Los Angeles, Britten, Pears, and MacNeice back in England. Dylan Thomas had not yet begun his American reading tours, but they were soon enough to set off fireworks displays all across the continent. Stephen Spender’s postwar sojourns were less electrifying, but very regular. But only Auden and Isherwood became American citizens. . . .
Author
John Matthias has published some thirty books of poetry, translation, criticism, and scholarship. For many years he taught at the University of Notre Dame, where he is still Editor at Large of Notre Dame Review. Shearsman Books publishes his three volumes of Collected Poems, as well as the uncollected long poem, Trigons, his two most recent volumes of shorter poems, Complayntes for Doctor Neuro and Acoustic Shadows, two books of memoirs and literary essays, and the novel Different Kinds of Music. Two collaborative books have been published by Dos Madres: Revolutions (with Jean Dibble and Robert Archambeau) and Regrounding a Pilgrimage (with John Peck).