Letters from Iceland is a travel book in prose and verse by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, published in 1937.
The book is made up of a series of letters and travel notes by Auden and MacNeice written during their trip to Iceland in 1936 compiling light-hearted private jokes and irreverent comments about their surrounding world.
Auden's contributions include the poem "Journey to Iceland"; a prose section "For Tourists"; a five-part verse "Letter to Lord Byron"; a selection of writings on Iceland by other authors, "Sheaves from Sagaland"; a prose letter to "E. M. Auden" (E.M. was Erika Mann), which included his poems "Detective Story" and "O who can ever praise enough"; a prose letter to Kristian Andreirsson, Esq.; a free-verse letter to William Coldstream, and, in collaboration with MacNeice, "W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament" (in verse).
MacNeice's contributions include a verse letter to Graham and Anne Shepard; the satiric prose "Hetty to Nancy" (unsigned); a verse Epilogue; and MacNeice's contributions to "W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament".
Auden revised his sections of the book for a new edition published in 1966.
The book is mentioned multiple times throughout the 2007 Oscar-nominated film, Away from Her , in which several passages are read aloud during the film.
Letters from Iceland is categorised under the "Inter-war pastorals" style of writing, [1] where poets are attached to an imaginary countryside from where they contemplate people, literature and politics.
The book is considered as a thirties classics.
In 1994, poets Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell visited Iceland for a documentary for BBC Radio 3, Second Draft from Sagaland, and wrote a follow-up book to Auden and MacNeice's, entitled Moon Country: Further Reports from Iceland. [2]
"20 editions published between 1937 and 2007 in 4 languages and held by 916 libraries worldwide"
Wystan Hugh Auden was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes, such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".
The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse: An Anthology of Verse in Britain 1900-1950 was a poetry anthology edited by John Heath-Stubbs and David Wright, and first published in 1953 by Faber and Faber. A selection in self-conscious contrast to the Faber Book of Modern Verse, it did not attempt to cover American poetry. It has been through numerous further editions. It was last issued as a hardback in St. Clair Shores, Michigan by Somerset Publishers Inc. in 1988 with ISBN 0-403-07212-3.
Michael Roberts, originally named William Edward Roberts, was an English poet, writer, scientist, mathematician, critic and broadcaster, a polymath who made his living as a teacher.
Frederick Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright, and a member of the so-called Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly or simplistically political as some of his contemporaries, he expressed a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his roots.
Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006), about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
The Auden Group or the Auden Generation is a group of British and Irish writers active in the 1930s that included W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and sometimes Edward Upward and Rex Warner. They were sometimes called simply the Thirties poets.
The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts, by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, was the second and most successful play in the Auden-Isherwood collaboration, first published in 1936. It was a major contribution to English poetic drama in the 1930s. It has been seen as a parable about will, leadership and the nature of power: matters of increasing concern in Europe as that decade progressed.
Journey to a War is a travel book in prose and verse by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, published in 1939.
Another Time is a book of poems by W. H. Auden, published in 1940.
The Orators: An English Study is a long poem in prose and verse written by W. H. Auden, first published in 1932. It is regarded as a major contribution to modernist poetry in English.
The Dance of Death is a one-act play in verse and prose by W. H. Auden, published in 1933.
On This Island is a book of poems by W. H. Auden, first published under the title Look, Stranger! in the UK in 1936, then published under Auden's preferred title, On this Island, in the US in 1937. It is also the title of one of the poems in the collection.
The Double Man is a book of poems by W. H. Auden, published in 1941. The title of the UK edition, published later the same year was New Year Letter.
"The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest" is a long poem by W.H. Auden, written 1942–44, and first published in 1944. Auden regarded the work as “my Ars Poetica, in the same way I believe The Tempest to have been Shakespeare’s.”
This is a bibliography of books, plays, films, and libretti written, edited, or translated by the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973). See the main entry for a list of biographical and critical studies and external links.
The Earth Compels was the second poetry collection by Louis MacNeice. It was published by Faber and Faber on 28 April 1938, and was one of four books by Louis MacNeice to appear in 1938, along with I Crossed the Minch, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay and Zoo.
The Sunlight on the Garden is a 24-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was written in late 1936 and was entitled Song at its first appearance in print, in The Listener magazine, January 1937. It was first published in book form as the third poem in MacNeice's poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). The poem explores themes of time and loss, along with anxiety about the darkening political situation in Europe following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. It is one of the best known and most anthologized of MacNeice's short poems. George MacBeth describes it as "one of MacNeice's saddest and most beautiful lyrics".
"Epilogue for W. H. Auden" is a 76-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was written in late 1936 and was first published in book form in Letters from Iceland, a travel book in prose and verse by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice (1937). MacNeice subsequently included it as the last poem in his poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). "Epilogue for W. H. Auden" reviews the Iceland trip MacNeice and Auden had taken together in the summer of 1936; the poem mentions events that had occurred while MacNeice and Auden were in Iceland, such as the fall of Seville and the Olympic Games in Berlin.
Bucolics is a sequence of poems by W. H. Auden written in 1952 and 1953. The seven poems in the sequence are: "Winds", "Woods, "Mountains", "Lakes", "Islands", "Plains", and "Streams".
Letters from Iceland is referenced in several scenes of the 2006 film Away from Her . The protagonist, whose wife is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, reads to her passages from the book, which - until she lost her memory - was dear to both of them.