
Luke Batterham
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'I AM INCREDIBLY HAPPY, SPENDING MY SUBSTANCE ON STRUMPETS': AUDEN SENDS DAY-LEWIS A POEM FROM BERLIN. This poem – later given the title 'A Free One' – was to appear in Auden's first regularly-published collection, the Poems issued by Faber in 1930; for the version as it appears here, see The English Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, 1977, pp. 31-32, where it is dated to March 1929. The poem Auden acknowledges in his turn is Day-Lewis's 'Letter to W.H. Auden', which was to be published as an epilogue to From Feathers to Iron by the Hogarth Press in 1931. Day-Lewis had clearly just heard that it had been accepted for publication, as Auden congratulates him: "It is splendid about the Hogarth Press". Our letter is quoted by Sean Day-Lewis, C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life, 1980, p. 55.