In general it is true that the diagnostician took over, and in the later poems an urbane, benevolent, slightly smug Auden is forever lecturing, warning, or advising his readers. Also, the poems became very long indeed. “New Year Letter” (1941), “For the Time Being” (1944), and The Age of Anxiety might be rated partial successes. “For the Time Being” (subtitled “A Christmas Oratorio”) began life as a libretto for Benjamin Britten and has good bits—the wise men, the narrator—as well as long, indigestible passages, particularly Saint Simeon’s meditation: While at school Laird won national poetry competitions but was set to study law at Cambridge before changing to English. "As is fairly usual for any small town, if you were regarded as having half a brain it was assumed you should become a doctor or a lawyer. So while changing was obviously the right decision for me, it was a big thing to give up a vocational course for something more abstract."

Auden is, I think, 31. I am 23. I don’t know Auden, but I think he sounds bad: the heavy, jocular prefect, the boy bushranger, the school wag, the 6th form debater, the homosexual clique-joker. I think he sometimes writes with great power: “O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless heaven, Make simpler daily the beating of man’s heart.” I can’t agree he’s as bad as [Archibald] MacLeish. He’s overpraised of course. I’ve added my own little dollop of praise in a number of New Verse devoted entirely, with albino portrait and manuscript, to gush and pomp about him. He’s exactly what the English literary public think a modern English poet should be. He’s perfectly educated (& expensively) but still delightfully eccentric…. He’s just what he should be: let him rant his old communism, it’s only a young man’s natural rebelliousness, (& besides, it doesn’t convert anybody: the awarding of conservative prizes to anti-conservatives who are found to be socially harmless is a fine, soothing palliative, & a shrewd gesture. And, incidentally too, the rich minority can always calm down a crier of “Equality for All” by giving him individual equality with themselves). As Laird read, as the force of the poem’s formal feeling hit the screen, the pressure of words exerted a power greater than any flash of breaking news. ‘I want the poem to destroy time’, he announced, defying the laws of reality, and time itself felt and moved differently for the duration. The walls throbbed, closed in. The poem itself turned into a dark panic room. No exit. No release. Auden’s move to America prompted some rancor in the literary world. He was recruited to the Morale Division of the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany, 5 where he interviewed German citizens about the war and “got no answers that we didn’t expect.” He returned briefly to London in 1945, and Robert Graves’s attitude seems not untypical: “Ha ha about Auden: the rats return to the unsunk ship.” Laird was born in Northern Ireland in 1975 and brought up in Cookstown, County Tyrone, where Martin McGuinness later went on to become the local MP. He says home was not bookish but by the age of 11 he had polished off his mother's Jeffrey Archer and Maeve Binchy novels. He always liked poetry at school and even wrote some: "soft Celtic twilights, Yeatsian wind among the reeds sort of thing". Then he studied Heaney's Death of a Naturalist for GCSE "and here were these very hard, clean-lined poems about things you could see out of the window".Through the reading and shortlisting process, the judges spoke often about their sense of responsibility toward the incredible selection of books submitted, and how they felt that the wealth of works in contention across all categories was a strong testament to the vitality of poetry in the UK today.” Suffering anorexia in her teens, an attempt to claim “ownership of [her] body,” she entered psychoanalysis for seven years, which she says “taught [her] to think.” The illness seemed to foreshadow many of the preoccupations—death, control, form—of her poetry: The Wild Iris is a lasting achievement, a beautifully weighted collection of human strangeness and human suffering. The “words washed clean” (William Carlos Williams) and the acute truths meet in a cycle of poems that stand with the best of anyone’s work.

I had recently read a popular science book and learned that gravity is not what I thought it was, a singular force, but more a case of matter and spacetime causing change in each other. Every evening for about a month, I sat on the swings in a local playground trying to understand what I’d read and why it had taken me so long to find out. Then I saw MÁM. Then I listened to radio interviews with the choreographer, Michael Keegan-Dolan, and Cormac Begley’s CDs. After that, I watched the documentary film by Pat Collins about the collaborative process of making the show. D. No, I have discovered the origin of life. Fourteen months I hesitated before I concluded this diagnosis. I received the morning star for this. My head will be left at death for clever medical analysis. The laugh will be gone and the microbe in command. The man who, during the thirties, was one of the five or six best poets in the world has gradually turned into a rhetoric mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo, into an automaton that keeps making little jokes, little plays on words, little rhetorical engines, as compulsively and unendingly and uneasily as a neurotic washes his hands. People moving in space to music. A kiss with twenty-two different meanings. Crisps and fizzy orange. Centring simple forms and openness when we’ve been taught to want complexity. The intensity of their skill brought about a crossing point in me. A clear view of how the contents of a space influence movement and a stunning proof that the creation of something is an exchange of energy, a meeting of forces, and it predates everything. F6, with Isherwood, and he published the collection Look, Stranger! (published in the US the following year as On This Island), which contains some of his loveliest lyrics (“Out on the lawn I lie in bed”) and shows signs of Auden accepting his sexuality. The military metaphors are reprised, for example, in poem XXVI, but it turns out the passes do not need to be controlled:

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Sasha de Buyl writes short stories and creative non-fiction. Their work has been published in Gutter, Bloomers and Belfield Literary Review among others. In 2022, they were awarded an Arts Council Agility Award for Literature. Mendelson has been studying, explicating, and collating Auden’s work for more than fifty years, since Auden asked him, around 1970, when Mendelson was a young teacher at Yale, to help organize his uncollected essays into what became Forewords and Afterwords (1973). Mendelson, recalling the selection process to another biographer of Auden’s, Richard Davenport-Hines, said the poet But Auden introduced, or tried to, a certain kind of irony into American poetry, even as America was teaching him the revelations of a more puritan, more direct way of being, or of reporting being. (In The Sea and the Mirror, his long poem-as-commentary on The Tempest, he has Prospero ask, “Can I learn to suffer/Without saying something ironic or funny/On suffering?”) As he told a Time interviewer in 1947: By Him is dispelled the darkness wherein the fallen will cannot distinguish between temptation and sin, for in Him we become fully conscious of Necessity as our freedom to be tempted, and of Freedom as our Necessity to have faith…

Why do so few ask why those most affected by the train are forced or reduced to writing about the train? Who pushed us onto the train and what would happen if we refused to bring everything we create on board?There was the poet on screen, alone in a white room , in camera, both intimate and at a distance, not quite meeting our eyes, speaking not to an audience but directly to the dead: