![]() And the great – and latterly disavowed – lament for a falling world "September 1st, 1939". The decade following WH Auden's emigration to New York in 1939 produced not only the long poems "For the Time Being", "New Year Letter" and "The Sea and the Mirror" – his sublime meditation on The Tempest – but some of the finest works of this or any 20th-century poet: "In Memory of WB Yeats", "At the Grave of Henry James", "If I Could Tell You", "The Fall of Rome", "The Quest". "The Age of Anxiety" is the strangest flower of a marvellously fertile period. It was the last long poem he would write. It would inspire a symphony and a ballet and win the Pulitzer prize. ![]() ![]() On its publication three years later it would garner some of the worst reviews he ever got and leave many of his devotees cold: while TS Eliot hailed it as "his best work to date", the Times Literary Supplement deemed it "his one dull book, his one failure". I n 1944, in New York City, against a background of a changed and frightening world, the finest – and most controversial – English poet of the day began work on a new long poem. ![]()
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