From the Official Department of Diary Rescue: W. H. Auden’s ‘Lost’ 1939 Journal Discovered! May 13, 2013: The Independent reports that one of the most exceptional diaries kept by W.H. Auden has at long-last been discovered! Auden began the journal in August of 1939 and continued writing in it until November of that very same year. According to Edward Mendelson, an English professor at Columbia University who is also the literary executor of [...] by Harriet Staff

Code Unknown: 23 Things About W. H. Auden April 25, 2013: [caption id="attachment_65785" align="alignright" width="500"] W. H. Auden[/caption] One day, while he and Stephen Spender were students at Oxford, Spender told him that he was thinking of stopping writing poetry. Auden stopped in his tracks, took firm hold of Spender’s arm and said, “You must keep writing poetry, Stephen—we need [...] by Bill Berkson

Auden’s Poem Backdrops Short Film by Peter Szewczyk November 13, 2012: Check it out! Over at Poets & Writers you can watch "Your Crooked Heart," directed, edited, and produced by Peter Szewczyk. The film includes W. H. Auden's poem "As I Walked Out One Evening." Here you go! by Harriet Staff

Can You Disown Your Old, Crappy Poems? Sometimes, Says The Atlantic August 30, 2012: Any writer worth their salt has cringed while re-reading earlier work. Among them, says a recent post on The Atlantic, was W. H. Auden, who fiddled with an early poem for some time before finally determining it was worthless. Unfortunately for Auden, that poem was "September 1, 1939." Despite his distaste for the poem, especially its most [...] by Harriet Staff

Larkin’s unexpected Hallmark moment May 29, 2012: Can great poetry bear a resemblance to a Hallmark moment and still be great? Prolly not. But Ron Rosenbaum takes up the issue over at Slate by looking at 2 most-famous lines by 2 most-famous poets. The lines and poets in question: 1) "What will survive of us is love" from Philip Larkin's "An Arundel Tomb." 2) “We must love one another or [...] by Harriet Staff

Musical in which Auden is a Central Character Opens at Public Theater May 8, 2012: February House, a "a word-drunk new musical" that "shuttles organically between literary sense and harmonic sensibility" with W.H. Auden, among other luminaries, as a central character, opens Tuesday at Public Theater. From this NY Times article: Based on actual events, “February House” is about the serendipitous discovery, amid [...] by Harriet Staff

Tracing the Roots of the phrase “Meh” to… Auden? February 29, 2012: Well, not quite. This now popular monosyllable has deeper roots, but Ben Zimmer, who has been investigating this utterance for a few years now, and wrote this Boston Globe piece on it, looks at a few of its major utterances further in this Language Log post. He begins: When I first posted here in 2006 about the indifferent [...] by Harriet Staff