Letters from Iceland
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In the summer of 1936, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice visited Iceland on commission to write a travel book, but found themselves capturing concerns on a scale that were far more international. 'Though writing in a "holiday" spirit,' commented Auden, 'its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing everyday more powerful and a world-war more inevitable.' The result is the remarkable Letters from Iceland, a collaboration in poetry and prose, reportage and correspondence, published in 1937 with the Spanish Civil War newly in progress, beneath the shadow of looming world war.
W. H. Auden's first book, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber in 1930. He went to Spain during the civil war, to Iceland and later travelled to China. In 1939 he and Christopher Isherwood left for America. He died in Vienna in 1973. Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907. His first book of poems, Blind Fireworks, appeared in 1929. The Burning Perch, his last volume of poems, appeared shortly before his death in 1963.