‘September I, 1939’: A Biography of a Poem
- Submitting institution
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Queen's University of Belfast
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 218790069
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Harper Collins
- ISBN
- 0007557213
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This item is included as an example of conventional literary scholarship – e.g. a scholarly monograph about Auden – but rather as an example of ‘creative writing/‘life writing’ that offers significant critical insight into Sansom’s life as juxtaposed with his life reading Auden’s poem. As such it is not so much a book about Auden or Auden’s poem as a book about twenty-five years of reading – where reading is not necessarily confined to just reading Auden’s poem. Although the book offers insights into ‘September 1, 1939’ and the context for the poem (stanza by stanza), its significant lies in the way it reflects on the nature of literary obsessions and their ongoing and ever-changing meaning for readers in general and for Sansom in particular. Auden’s poem, then, is the mechanism through which Sansom has structured an ‘anti-literary critical’ (as that’s understood in conventional terms) way of living with and through, and writing about books; the degree to which his own story and own writing (including the recognition that his own books are not ‘great’) are filtered through the lens of a lifetime reading is important to how it works, and that reading itself is despatched to us in little suggestive nuggets. It’s as much a close (and creative) autobiography of Sansom than it’s a biography of a poem – although that calls for a certain amount of reading between the lines, and reading behind the ‘Auden’ or surface preoccupation to the ‘self’ also revealed through its pages. Therefore the significance, originality and rigour of this creative-critical output relates not to its critical insights into Auden’s poem but rather to what it reveals about the ongoing challenges and difficulties of obsessive reading over a twenty-five year period and how one gauges one’s life against the achievements of ‘great’ writing.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -