Early W H Auden poems found in 1920s school magazine

A previously unknown collection of poems, believed to be that of W H Auden, have been discovered in a school magazine.

London, Sept 5 : A previously unknown collection of poems, believed to be that of W H Auden, have been discovered in a school magazine.

The poems were found by John Smart, a former head of art, who came across the literary goldmine while researching the life of John Hayward, a close friend and critic of T S Eliot.

The poems are thought to be early examples of Auden's work, and are to form part of his centenary celebrations at Gresham's School next week.

Mr Smart came across the poems while reading old copies of The Gresham, the magazine Hayward edited during his time at the school in Holt, Norfolk, where he was a pupil a few years before Auden.

In one of the magazines, Mr Smart came across a poem entitled "Evening and Night on Primrose Hill", which while not a sonnet believed to have been lost, has some Auden hallmarks, including the rhyme of "hill" and "still" and "the way that he likes to end his poems with almost an epiphany", reports The Independent.

This poem was published on 16 December 1922, the year in which Auden decided to become a poet.

Mr Smart believes a second poem published in The Gresham, on 28 July 1923, entitled "To a Tramp met in the Holidays in Monmouthshire", is also a part of Auden's earlier work as it not only contains his trademark rhyme: "hill/ still", but also the fact that Auden was a regular visitor to Monmouth.

Smart argues that though a third poem has less evidence that link it to Auden, it can be done so on subject matter as "Enchanted" talks about an enchanted pool where "Merlin shall entice thy feet". This could reflect Auden's debt to Walter de la Mare's poems on magic and fairies, he states.

And though Smart said that "none of the poems I've found I could claim was a great poem", he added that the juxtaposition of "Evening and Night on Primrose Hill" and the more traditional "Dawn" in 1922, the year in which T S Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses were published, showed "the modern, put against the old way - two totally different styles".

ANI