{"id":2685,"date":"2015-08-20T15:13:34","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T14:13:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=2685"},"modified":"2015-08-20T19:40:29","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T18:40:29","slug":"letter-from-iceland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=2685","title":{"rendered":"Letter from Iceland"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Letters-from-Iceland-TP_zpsb65ae8d4\"<\/a>Difficult to be here without thinking of the travel book W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice wrote in 1936 when they came.\u00a0 Letters from Iceland<\/em> is a curious and in some ways very lazy book, which they threw together for Fabers at a time when such golden boys they could pretty much do anything they wanted.<\/p>\n

So in some ways it\u2019s a mischievous anti-travel book<\/strong> that tweaks the tale of more serious contemporaries like Peter Fleming.\u00a0 There\u2019s quite a lot of \u2018I can\u2019t really be bothered to do this,\u2019 with deliberately amateur black-and-white pictures.\u00a0 At one point they just bundle in\u00a0a whole anthology of clippings from previous visitors to bulk it up a bit.<\/p>\n

But it also signals a sea change in their own writing – in Iceland, they can loosen up, free from the pressures of being \u2018the voices of their generation\u2019 back home, a particular pressure on Auden.\u00a0 He had read Byron\u2019s Don Juan<\/em> on the boat over and the idea came to him (in a
\nbus when travelling across Iceland) that, for the first time, he could write some similar light verse, in the form of letters home to friends in England in which he could put \u2018anything I could think of about Europe, literature, myself\u2019 . And this lovely couplet about a place I\u2019ve just visited as well:<\/p>\n

\u2018In Seythisfj\u00f6rdur every schoolboy knows
\nThat daylight in the summer never goes.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"imagesMacNeice contributes much less to the book – some eighty-one pages out of the first edition\u2019s two hundred forty – but has some equally effective couplets in his own verse letter which prefigures the\u00a0great wartime Autumn Journal<\/em>:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

\u2018Here we can take a breath, sit back, admire
\nstills from the film of life, the frozen fire\u2019<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

\"download
they rode on ponies around the glacier of Langjokull<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There was a subtext to their visit\u00a0as well.\u00a0 Some Nazi anthropologist were also visiting the island in an attempt to prove that it displayed pure, isolationist Aryan characteristics.\u00a0 The two poets tried to show in contrast that it was the model for a quiet, democratic nation, free from such shrill nationalistic yearnings.\u00a0 And it was in Iceland that Auden first heard the news about the civil war in Spain, and everything changed\u2026.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

\"images<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Difficult to be here without thinking of the travel book W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice wrote in 1936 when they came.\u00a0 Letters from Iceland is a curious and in some ways very lazy book, which they threw together for Fabers at a time when such golden boys they could pretty much do anything they wanted. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,3],"tags":[133,132,134],"class_list":["post-2685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-travel","tag-auden","tag-iceland","tag-macneice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2685"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2706,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685\/revisions\/2706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}