Publications

By Alan Myers and Robert Forsythe, this book is the culmination of many months work and investigation into the connections between the Pennine Hills and one of this country's most noted poets.W.H. Auden has been described as the most important native English poet of our time. Uniquely among the major poets of his era, he was greatly drawn to northern Europe. Many of his early poems are strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon verse, and he frequently resorted to virtuoso alliteration then and later. 'I'm Nordic myself,' he says in one poem, and claimed that his name was of Icelandic origin. He translated a number of the Norse sagas and in 1931 he spent time in Shetland, some of whose place names appear in The Orators, published in the following year. Subsequently he made the celebrated voyage which resulted in Lettersfiom Iceland (1937). In May 1961, at the age of 54, Auden fulfilled a lifelong ambition by visiting Hammerfest in Nonvay, the most northerly town in the world. He revisited Iceland in 1964 and even at the end of his life, he was supposedly intending to spend half the year in that country 'whose harsh and sunless climate appeals to him', as the London Evening Standard put it. In 1938, Christopher Ishenvood had ascribed Auden's low spirits on their China-bound ship to his being uprooted from his 'beloved chilly North'. Isherwood writes of him:

'His romantic travel-wish was always towards the north. He could never understand how anyone could long for the sun, the blue sky, the palm-trees of the south. His favourite weather was autumnal, high wind and driving rain'.