Refugee Blues 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 dramatizes 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. In some later editions of Auden's poetry, the poem is not identified by name but is the
The Traveller (poem) his Tory suspicion of commerce. Readers of all ages soon began to discover "The Traveller"’s merits. The 17-year-old Charles James Fox admired the poem; a few years later the even younger William Wordsworth read "The Traveller", and was influenced by it when he wrote his earliest surviving poem, "Lines Written as a School Exercise". The poem's critical reception continued high, though it often suffered by comparison with his "The Deserted Village". The bibliographer Egerton Brydges preferred "The Traveller": The sentiments are always interesting, generally just, and often new; the imagery is elegant, picturesque, and occasionally sublime; the language is nervous,