Up Late: Poems

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Lucy Macnab, co-executive director of the Forward Arts Foundation, said: “We view this partnership as a significant step toward our future strategic vision: to move away from the dominance of London in the UK’s creative and cultural life; a drive toward working more inclusively with young people, emerging voices, and diverse audiences, putting them at the centre of our practice; and working with partners that put poetry at the heart of their creative offer.” The full shortlists

By Him is dispelled the darkness wherein the fallen will cannot distinguish between temptation and sin, for in Him we become fully conscious of Necessity as our freedom to be tempted, and of Freedom as our Necessity to have faith… Auden is, I think, 31. I am 23. I don’t know Auden, but I think he sounds bad: the heavy, jocular prefect, the boy bushranger, the school wag, the 6th form debater, the homosexual clique-joker. I think he sometimes writes with great power: “O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless heaven, Make simpler daily the beating of man’s heart.” I can’t agree he’s as bad as [Archibald] MacLeish. He’s overpraised of course. I’ve added my own little dollop of praise in a number of New Verse devoted entirely, with albino portrait and manuscript, to gush and pomp about him. He’s exactly what the English literary public think a modern English poet should be. He’s perfectly educated (& expensively) but still delightfully eccentric…. He’s just what he should be: let him rant his old communism, it’s only a young man’s natural rebelliousness, (& besides, it doesn’t convert anybody: the awarding of conservative prizes to anti-conservatives who are found to be socially harmless is a fine, soothing palliative, & a shrewd gesture. And, incidentally too, the rich minority can always calm down a crier of “Equality for All” by giving him individual equality with themselves). Auden’s move to America prompted some rancor in the literary world. He was recruited to the Morale Division of the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany, 5 where he interviewed German citizens about the war and “got no answers that we didn’t expect.” He returned briefly to London in 1945, and Robert Graves’s attitude seems not untypical: “Ha ha about Auden: the rats return to the unsunk ship.”

Up Late

Hardy, Edward Thomas, the Anglo-Saxon poems were important early influences. (Fittingly, perhaps, considering the extensive criticism and poetry he wrote looking to Shakespeare, his first poem was published in the school magazine under the typo “W.H. Arden.”) He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1925, where he studied natural science, then PPE (politics, philosophy, economics), and finally English, under the medieval scholar Nevill Coghill, graduating with a third-class degree but a university-wide reputation for his brilliance and for his poetry. As an undergraduate he read and imitated Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, and Laura Riding.

In his review of Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, Auden quotes Berlin’s famous thesis: hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision,” while the foxes “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” Dante, Plato, Hegel, Proust, Nietzsche, and Ibsen are hedgehogs, while Herodotus, Aristotle, Molière, Montaigne, Goethe, and Joyce are foxes. Auden goes on: The man who, during the thirties, was one of the five or six best poets in the world has gradually turned into a rhetoric mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo, into an automaton that keeps making little jokes, little plays on words, little rhetorical engines, as compulsively and unendingly and uneasily as a neurotic washes his hands. Up Late was written by Laird as an elegy to his father, who died of Covid in March 2021. The judges felt Up Late “sincerely engaged with death, grief and the private and shared lived experience of the pandemic in ways which readers will find profoundly moving and cathartic”. Adult readers may enjoy seeing a different side to some of our finest writers, but for children, this is irrelevant; they just want great stories, brilliantly told. With these three new books, that’s exactly what they’ve got. The central long poem that gives the collection its title is perfect - an elegy for Laird's father, a meditation not just on death and grief, but on how we try to explain or capture death and grief and what's been lost; and how language always fails to do this, but it's all we have, so on we go. With each new segment of the poem Laird opens this up into more expansive, philosophical, spiritual spaces while keeping it completely individual, through details gathered about himself and his father. A masterpiece.He also teaches, most recently at Princeton and Barnard in the US, where their daughter is in school and where their next child will be born, after which they intend to spend more time in London.

Publisher Ithys Press is unrepentant, saying, “The book was conceived not as a commercial venture but as a carefully crafted tribute to a rather different Joyce, the family man and grandfather.” At the book's heart lies the title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying, the reverberations of which echo throughout in poems that interrogate inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retrieved. Laird is a poet capable of heading off in any and every direction, where layers of association transport us from a clifftop in County Cork to the library steps in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a Kilburn garden.

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F6, with Isherwood, and he published the collection Look, Stranger! (published in the US the following year as On This Island), which contains some of his loveliest lyrics (“Out on the lawn I lie in bed”) and shows signs of Auden accepting his sexuality. The military metaphors are reprised, for example, in poem XXVI, but it turns out the passes do not need to be controlled: Mónica Parle, co-executive director of the Forward Arts Foundation, the charity which runs the Forward Prizes, added: “We are incredibly proud of this year’s shortlist: it represents such a strong mix of known names and new talent, and perfectly embodies our aims at Forward, to champion the diverse scope of contemporary poetry published in the UK and Ireland. The received idea about Auden is that in the later work the complicated ambiguous truths elicited by play, by the parabolic, are overtaken by a more public, more life-involved tone, and the received idea is mostly true. It’s also thought that Auden’s American years produced less memorable and influential poems, although this is a more arguable proposal. The later books contain more than a few works of genius: Nones (1951) has “In Praise of Limestone,” and The Shield of Achilles (1955) contains “Bucolics” and the title poem, which strike me as being among the most accomplished things Auden—or anyone—ever wrote.