{"product_id":"9780007557233","title":"September 1, 1939 : W. H. Auden and the Afterlife of a Poem by Ian Sansom","description":"This is a book about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.             This is a book about a poet - W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left.             About a poem - `September 1, 1939', his most famous and celebrated, yet one which he tried to rewrite and disown and which has enjoyed - or been condemned - to a tragic and unexpected afterlife.             About a city - New York, an island, an emblem of the Future, magnificent, provisional, seamy, and in 1939 about to emerge as the defining twentieth-century cosmopolis, the capital of the world.             And about a world at a point of change - about 1939, and about our own Age of Anxiety, about the aftermath of September 11, when many American newspapers reprinted Auden's poem in its entirety on their editorial pages.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56220463169909,"sku":"9780007557233","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780007557233.jpg?v=1762188232","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9780007557233","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}