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W H Auden’s centenary celebrated at York literary conference

Posted on 21 February 2007

Although considered one of the most distinctive and influential English poets of the 20th century, W H Auden’s works are rarely taught in schools and universities.

A one-day conference in York celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth this week will re-examine his overlooked literary legacy.

Organised by the English departments at the universities of York and Sussex, it will see academics and poets from the UK and USA gather at the King’s Manor in York, just yards from Auden’s birthplace in Bootham, to celebrate one of the most versatile and prolific poets of the modern world.

The conference, on Saturday 24 February, brings together poets (including the American Rachel Wetzsteon and Australian Peter Porter) and academics (including the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, currently a Visiting Professor at York, the critic Professor Stan Smith, editor of the Cambridge Companion to Auden, and the novelist Kate Bucknell, editor of Auden’s Juvenilia) to talk about Auden’s work in relation to film, industrial Britain and the poetic form.

We want to celebrate the capacity of [Auden's] art to live up to his exhilarating definition of poetry as ‘memorable speech’

Hugh Haughton

Hugh Haughton, of the Department of English and Related Literature, says: "Our goal is to mark his centenary by acknowledging his unique legacy through poems, papers, films showings, and informal discussion, exploring some of the ways his astonishingly eclectic and individual output has changed the way we see.

"Above all, we want to celebrate the capacity of his art to live up to his exhilarating definition of poetry as ‘memorable speech’, and hope that we can generate some memorable speech of our own, a few hundred yards from the poet’s birthplace, and three days after his centenary."

Some of Auden’s work is familiar to a wider audience. ‘Night Mail’ was written as a voice-over for a GPO film about a mail train’s journey from London to Scotland, with a score by Benjamin Britten. ‘Stop All the Clocks’, written in 1935 and originally entitled ‘Funeral Blues’, was recited by John Hannah in the film Four Weddings and A Funeral and spurred a renewed interest in Auden’s love poetry, while ‘September 1, 1939’, written at the outset of World War II, has also become a poetic anthem for 9/11.

But many of Auden’s other works, including the verse play ‘The Ascent of F6’ (in which ‘Stop all the Clocks’ appears) and his collection of more than 400 poems and as many essays, have received little public attention since his death in 1973. Hugh Haughton added: "His life and career were ripe in contradictions, and his art thrived on them. He began as an English poet, and ended as an American one, began as a revolutionary enfant terrible and ended as a baroque Old Fogey."