The new issue for Spring 2000 is our ninetieth birthday edition and, at 88 pages, the largest ever published. The last edition prepared during the twentieth century, this issue reunites three former editors of Oxford Poetry who last appeared together in Oxford Poetry 1928.
"I should like a play to present a palpable conflict between individuals...": MacNeice's handwritten notes for a lecture on drama, made only a few months before the writing of his previously unpublished play Blacklegs, the story of steeplejacks on an Irish church in a General Strike
This issue includes extensive previously unpublished writing by Auden, Spender and MacNeice:
- W. H. Auden: an 81-line poem on visiting the Sphinx (1938), introduced by John Fuller
- Stephen Spender: a chapter from his first novel, Instead of Death (1929), in which a fictionalised Spender and Auden meet and argue about poetry, introduced by Natasha Spender
- Louis MacNeice: the complete text of his play Blacklegs (1939), introduced by Jon Stallworthy, and a selection from his verse translation of Euripides' Hippolytus (1939)
There are also new poems by Kate Clanchy, David Constantine, Peter Scupham and others.
"A young man living on nothing borrows a shilling from another man living on the dole and he takes his girl to the pictures. And what do they see? Glamour girls in seven-and-elevenpenny stockings drinking cocktails on swansdown sofas..."
— Louis MacNeice, Blacklegs
"...I drove a truck for the T.U.C. during the General Strike. But one mustn’t fall for a one-sided view of life, a view that says the capitalists are wicked, or that poverty is intolerable, even if, in fact one fights capitalism and poverty. Capitalists are just human beings trapped in certain circumstances..."
— "Vernon" (Auden), in Stephen Spender’s Instead of Death
Index / Back to Volume X number 3