September 1, 1939. Ian Sansom

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Wow!

      At just after five o’clock on 11 June 1956, W. H. Auden stood up to give his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry at the Sheldonian Theatre, the very heart of the university, adjacent to the Bodleian and the Clarendon Building, opposite Blackwell’s bookshop on Broad Street, and a short walk from Auden’s old college, Christ Church.

      It was a warm afternoon. Auden, famously crumpled, had enjoyed, I imagine, a good lunch and was sweating in his thick black MA gown with its distinctive, gaudy crimson shot-silk hood. He was buzzing: he had long since adopted a strict chemical daily routine to enable him to work more efficiently. These ‘labor-saving devices’, in what he called his ‘mental kitchen’, included not only strategic quantities of alcohol, coffee and tobacco, but also the amphetamine Benzedrine, as a pick-me-up at breakfast, and the barbiturate Seconal, to bring him down at night. ‘If you ever get that depressed unable-to-concentrate feeling, try taking Benzidrine [sic] Tablets,’ he advised his friend Annie Dodds, ‘but not too many.’

The Sheldonian was full: the audience were expectant. The University Chancellor, the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors were in full fig – black gowns, gold lace, white tie. The undergraduates and graduate students wore subfusc and were crammed into the high-tiered seating under the lurid sunburst-orange ceiling fresco by King Charles II’s court painter Robert Streater, which depicts Truth descending upon the Arts and Sciences like the wolf