In Competition No. 2440 you were invited to offer a poem which is a pastiche of one or all of the young left-wing poets of the early 1930s, MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day Lewis. William Empson’s ‘Just a Smack at Auden’ is an affectionate send-up worth looking for. I have room only for one verse:
What was said by Marx, boys, what did he perpend?
No good being sparks, boys, waiting for the end.
Treason of the clerks, boys, curtains that descend.
Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end.
Auden tended to dominate this comp, just as he tended to dominate his contemporaries. Among the non-prizewinning entries that paid impressive tribute to him, those by Ray Kelley and James Womack stood out. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Michael Swan takes the bonus fiver.
Not for us the extravagant gesture, the parade on stilts,
The highwire walk in the spotlight over the crocodile pool.
What
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