Poetry and the landscape are changing – and the poets are on the move. On a train leaving Paddington, to be precise, on a Sunday in April c.1943, in a special carriage stuffed with them. Joseph Gurnard’s Poets’ Excursion is an extended metaphor of the shifting tide of British poetry and of the changing face of the landscape poets wrote…
Before the fragmented world of Instagram poets and TikTok book clubs, there was New World Writing: fifty cents, one paperback, and a whole literary world right on the magazine shelf at the drugstore and at the corner newsstand. Paperbacks, a Party, and Poets: The Story of New World Writing One evening in December 1951, a crowd gathered in an apartment…
Eighty years ago today – on January 26th, 1939 – the poet W.H.Auden – accompanied by his friend and sometime lover Christopher Isherwood – stepped off the boat and arrived in New York City. It wasn’t their first visit. They had spent two happy weeks in the city in 1938, arriving by train from Vancouver on their way back from…