It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse,
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse. – Cecil Day Lewis
New Writing was a literary periodical in book format, founded in 1936 by John Lehmann which provided a platform for experimental writing and presented a left-wing, ‘anti-fascist’ viewpoint. The series ran until 1950.
This issue begins with ‘The Way We live Now’ by Willy Goldman, a journalistic article in which the writer tries to make sense of the early years of World War II and the Blitz.
There are opinion pieces and short stories, including a couple of stories translated from French and one from Russian. There is an essay on Literary Criticism by Stephen Spender (1909 – 1995).
New Writing 3 sees the first publication of Cecil Day Lewis’s poem ‘Where are the War Poets?’ and includes the newly published poem by W H Auden (1907 – 1973), better known as ‘Lullaby’: “Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm …”.
Published by Penguin in 1941.
A vintage Penguin in good condition. A half-square inch of top left of back cover is missing.
