As put down in 1937's Letters from Iceland. It's an amazing poem, a crazy mixture of undergraduate in-jokeyness, sincere political concern, and a sort of passionate desperation to bid farewell to the "low dishonest decade" of the 30s three years early. You get the feeling that Auden and MacNeice really believed they were going to die soon, or that the world would end. These were some of the choicer bits that I copied out in the New York Public Library; I really need to get a copy of this for myself:"First to our ancestors…
We leave the values of their periods,
The things which seemed to them the things that mattered"
"all the lives by France gently stopped
We leave to Rome"
"Item, to Wittgenstein who writes such hits
As the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
We leave all readers who can spare the wits"
"…the Surrealists shall have
J.A. Smith as an Objet Trouvé in disguise."
"To our fellow writers, to the whole literary race
The Interest itself in all its circumstances
That each may see his vision face to face."
"To our two distinguished colleagues in confidence,
To Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, we assign
Our minor talents to assist in the defence
Of the European Tradition and to carry on
The Human Heritage."
[W.H.A.] "For my friend Benjamin Britten, composer, I beg
That fortune send him a passionate affair."
"…to Alfred Hitchcock, with sincerest praise of Sabotage"
[L.M.] "a copy of Marx and £1000 a year
And the picture of Love Locked Out by Holman Hunt"
[both] "To Dylan Thomas a leek on a gold plate"
"A terrible double entendre in metre or in prose
To William Empson"
"We leave with our best compliments the Isle of Wight
To Robert Graves and Laura Riding, because
An Italian island is no good place to write."
"The twin towers of the Crystal Palace we would leave
To Leonard and Virginia Woolf"
"our pudenda we leave or rather fling
Our biographers and The Thames Conservancy Board"
"Our humour, all we think is funny,
To Dr. Leavis and almost every psychoanalyst"
[W.H.A.] "hope that Erika, my wife, may have her wish
To see the just end of Hitler and his unjust rule"
[both] "We leave their marvelous native tongue
To Englishmen, and for our intelligent island pray
That to her virtuous beauties by all poets sung
She add at last an honest foreign policy."
