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It starts with that face - a wedding cake left out in the rain, as he himself described it. WH Auden was undoubtedly one of the greatest and most recognisable poets of the Twentieth Century, and one of the things that made him stand out was the strength of his work across different subjects. Most poets would be thrilled to be remembered for their love poetry, their metaphysical poetry, or their political poetry - Auden was an exceptional exponent of all three.

In this new three-part series marking 50 years since Auden鈥檚 death, Michael Symmons Roberts sets out to consider those three different aspects of Auden鈥檚 massive body of work, beginning with a look at the political poet who in his early years was perhaps the leading voice of the British cultural left.

As a young man in the 1930s Auden wrote powerful works such as 鈥楽pain鈥� that served as an ideological call to arms. Going on to witness the reality of battle in both Spain and China, he distanced himself from such poems and from the very idea that verse could make any practical political difference at all - 鈥渇or poetry makes nothing happen鈥� as he wrote in his elegy to W.B. Yeats.

Michael travels to Austria, where Auden spent his summers for the last fifteen years of his life and hears how the older poet remained politically active through helping writers in the Communist bloc in spite of this aversion to directly engaged verse. He also looks at those great poems of Auden鈥檚 later career, including 鈥楾he Fall of Rome鈥�, that offer a more mythological reading of political events than the works of the 1930s that made him such a dominant figure in the cultural landscape.

Contributors include Alan Bennett, Katherine Bucknell, Carl Phillips, Zaffar Kunial, Timo Fr眉hwirth, Sandra Mayer.

Producer: Geoff Bird

Poems referenced in this episode include:

As I Walked Out One Evening
Spain
September 1st 1939
The Shield Of Achilles
The Fall Of Rome
Night Mail
Funeral Blues

All published by Faber & Faber

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