Manuscript notebook
"Looking at old work I keep finding ideas which one had no business to see already at that age, and a style of treatment which one ought to have outgrown years before."*
The manuscript notebook contains poems that Auden wrote while teaching at the Downs School, including some that were published in Look, Stranger!, as well as a speech from the play The Dog Beneath the Skin (co-authored by Christopher Isherwood) and two essays ("The Group Movement and the Middle Classes" and "Art and Psychology") which were printed in 1934 and 1935. The poem "In the Year of My Youth," published posthumously in Review of English Studies, also appears in this notebook.
If you are interested in getting a closer view of this manuscript notebook, or of the rest of the Swarthmore College Libraries' Auden Collection, please contact the Circulation Desk.
*Quoted by Humphrey Carpenter in W.H. Auden, A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981): "Looking at old work I keep finding ideas which one had no business to see already at that age, and a style of treatment which one should have outgrown years before." (from a letter to Louise Bogan, p. 330)