A collection of previously unknown poems, thought to be early examples of the work of W H Auden, have been unearthed in a school magazine, reports the Independent’s Ciar Byrne. The three poems from 1922 and 1923, which will form part of centenary celebrations for Wystan Hugh Auden at Gresham’s School next week, were discovered by John Smart, a former head of art, who chanced across them while researching the life of another literary old boy. Smart is writing a biography of John Hayward, a close friend of T S Eliot and an important critic of his work. In the course of his research, he read old copies of The Gresham, the magazine Hayward edited during his time at the school in Holt, Norfolk, where he was a pupil a couple of years before Auden.
Smart said: “None of the poems I’ve found I could claim was a great poem.” But, he added that the juxtaposition of “Evening and Night on Primrose Hill” and the more traditional “Dawn” in 1922, the year in which T S Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce‘s Ulysses were published, showed “the modern, put against the old way – two totally different styles”.