Description

Book Synopsis

''This is the night mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order...''
-- W.H. Auden

Wordsworth was the first laureate of locomotives: in fact he railed against them, and against the consequent opening up of the Lakes to holiday hordes (''On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway''). His dismay was echoed down the decades by disturbed ruralists, and yet the train has become part of our psychic landscape: some of the best-loved English poems - Edward Thomas''s ''Adlestrop'', or Philip Larkin''s ''Whitsun Weddings'' - have celebrated carriages, platforms and waiting rooms, while locomotion has inspired some of the most characteristic poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Stevenson, Hardy and MacNeice, Betjeman and Auden (whose ''Night Mail'' was written to accompany a 1930s GPO documentary about the postal express from Euston to Glasgow).

Co-edited by two of our most distinguished poets, Train Songs offers a round tour -

Train Songs Poetry of the Railway

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    Order before 4pm today for delivery by Wed 29 Jul 2026.

    A Paperback / softback by Don Paterson, Sean O'Brien, Don Paterson

    3 in stock

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      Publisher: Faber & Faber
      Publication Date: Publication Date: 15/05/2014
      ISBN13: 9780571315789, 978-0571315789
      ISBN10: 057131578X
      Also in:
      Biography Anthologies

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      ''This is the night mail crossing the border,
      Bringing the cheque and the postal order...''
      -- W.H. Auden

      Wordsworth was the first laureate of locomotives: in fact he railed against them, and against the consequent opening up of the Lakes to holiday hordes (''On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway''). His dismay was echoed down the decades by disturbed ruralists, and yet the train has become part of our psychic landscape: some of the best-loved English poems - Edward Thomas''s ''Adlestrop'', or Philip Larkin''s ''Whitsun Weddings'' - have celebrated carriages, platforms and waiting rooms, while locomotion has inspired some of the most characteristic poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Stevenson, Hardy and MacNeice, Betjeman and Auden (whose ''Night Mail'' was written to accompany a 1930s GPO documentary about the postal express from Euston to Glasgow).

      Co-edited by two of our most distinguished poets, Train Songs offers a round tour -

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