"The eminences that you are in the presence of do teach you,” says acclaimed biographer Megan Marshall. “Even if not directly how to write a poem, there are messages about life that are significant ...

Sitting in a bar on 52nd Street, WH Auden read in the “folded lie” of a newspaper about the accession of Danzig to the Third Reich. The poem he would write about the events of that night is the ...