Refugee Blues

"Refugee Blues" is a poem by W. H. Auden, written in 1939, one of a number of poems Auden wrote in the mid-to-late-1930s in blues and other popular metres, for example, the meter he used in his love poem "Calypso", written around the same time. The poem comments on the condition of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the years before World War II, especially the indifference and antagonism they faced when seeking asylum in the democracies of the period.^[1] In some later editions of Auden's poetry, the poem is not identified by name but is the first of ten poems grouped together in "Ten Songs", which also includes the above-mentioned "Calypso".

In abbreviated form it was set to music by Elisabeth Lutyens in Two Songs by W.H. Auden (1942) ^[2]

References

^ Held, James (Winter 1992). "Ironic Harmony: Blues Convention and Auden's "Refugee Blues"". Journal of Modern Literature. 18 (1). Indiana University Press: 139–142. JSTOR 3831552.
^ As of 2022 distributed by University Of York Music Press. The other song is As I walked out one evening.

External links

Sheila Hancock - Reading of 'Refugee Blues'
Analysis of poem at Litexpert

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W. H. Auden

Books of poetry

Poems (1930)
The Orators (1932)
On This Island (1936)
Another Time (1940)
The Double Man (1941)
For the Time Being (1944)
The Age of Anxiety (1947)
Nones (1951)
The Shield of Achilles (1955)
Homage to Clio (1960)
About the House (1966)
City Without Walls (1969)
Academic Graffiti (1971)
Epistle to a Godson (1972)
Thank You, Fog (1974)

Books containing
prose and verse

Letters from Iceland (1937, with Louis MacNeice)
Journey to a War (1939, with Christopher Isherwood)

Prose works
and other books

Individual poems

"The Orators" (1932)
"Funeral Blues" (1936)
"Spain" (1937)
"Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938)
"Refugee Blues" (1939)
"September 1, 1939" (1939)
"The Unknown Citizen" (1939)
"Hymn to St. Cecilia" (1940)
"For the Time Being" (1944)
"The Sea and the Mirror" (1944)
"The Age of Anxiety" (1947)
"In Praise of Limestone" (1948)
"The Platonic Blow" (1948)
"Horae Canonicae" (1949–55)
"Bucolics" (1952–53)
"The Shield of Achilles" (1955)

Plays

Paid on Both Sides (1928)
The Dance of Death (1933)
The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935)
The Ascent of F6 (1936)
On the Frontier (1938)
Play of Daniel (1958)

Libretti

Paul Bunyan (1941)
The Rake's Progress (1951)
Elegy for Young Lovers (1961)
The Bassarids (1966)
Love's Labour's Lost (1973)

Screenwriting

Night Mail (1936)

Family

Related

W. H. Auden bibliography

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