Published by Blackwell's x+48pp
edited by W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis
with Preface

OP 1927 was edited by Auden and Day Lewis during a short summer holiday at the New Inn, Appletreewick, in Yorkshire; they had only recently met. Day Lewis recalled that "Walking the moors there one day, we approached one of those dark walls which wind over the contours like strips of liquorice. A hundred yards from the wall, as if on a common impulse, we both began to run faster: at fifty or sixty yards, we broke into a trot, and we were sprinting all out over the last thirty yards or so. Arriving simultaneously at the wall, we gave each other an amused but also sheepish look." They also played leapfrog, if Day Lewis's 1960 account is to be believed, each writing alternate paragraphs of the Preface. This might explain why the second paragraph begins "On the other hand". Stephen Spender's memoir, "World Within World", cites the paragraph on a tripartite psychological problem as being typical of Auden's abstract thinking; Day Lewis claimed it was actually his, whereas the buffoonish passage about youth being a spiritual discipline was, according to Day Lewis, by Auden. We shall never know. At any rate the resulting preface, certainly the most quoted material ever to appear in Oxford Poetry, and which the authors (influenced perhaps by the topography) intended to stand comparison with Wordsworth's preface to the "Lyrical Ballads" was meant "in deadly earnest" notwithstanding "an insurance policy, in the form of deliberately portentous prose styles carrying pastiche to the edge of burlesque, against any risk of solemnity or self-importance." As to their contest, both graduated with miserably low marks and no evident prospects, and both later returned as Professor of Poetry.

Contents

W. H. Auden: Preface; Extract;

Norman Cameron, as J. N. Cameron: The Thespians of Thermopylae; Marine Lament; The Diver; Pretty Maids All in a Row; Virgin Russia; Decapitation of Is;

C. Day Lewis, as Cecil Day-Lewis: Preface; Transitional Poem (Part II);

Tom Driberg, as Thomas Driberg: Cottage Squalor; Transvaluation of All Values; Lonely Scholar; Panorama in Lilliput;

Wyndham Ketton-Cremer: Two Songs from a Play; To the New Icarus; Epitaph by Duke Theseus;

Louis MacNeice: (greek title); Harvest Thanksgiving; This Tournament;

Clere Parsons, as Clare Parsons: Paysages; Débâcle; Fragment from a Broken Ecstasy;

Charles Plumb: The Welcome; Poem;

Ronald McNair Scott, as R. McN. Scott: From 'Journey of the Spirit';

Eric Schroeder, as E. Schroeder: Myself; Evening of June;

John Richmond Theobald, as J. R. Theobald: Man Commanding; Invocation of Daybreak to the Rising Poets;

Anthony Thorne: The Arabian Nights; Sera Libertas;

Geoffrey Tillotson: The Goat;

Rex Warner, as R. E. Warner: Lotos Eaters; Anakreontic; Nativity; Impression; Resolution;

Eric Walter White: Opposite the Chariot;

Anonymous = V. M. Allom: An Ornithological View of Existence;

Anonymous = Christopher Isherwood: Souvenir des Vacances;