Graham Fawcett leads this lecture-performance with readings in the World Poets series - offering another way of lecturing, more like listening to a live radio programme.

W H Auden was a giant among poets of his generation, a master-craftsman of metrical rhythms that run like Swiss clockwork through his verse lines, and a wonderfully adventurous organist of the English language.

Nourished by his native Yorkshire and the treasures of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, traveller to Iceland, China, Spain and Berlin, close-quarters commentator on politics, religion, philosophy, art and human relations, Auden translated his gifted perceptions into some of the finest and most substantial poems England and the world have ever seen.

The experience of hearing him read from his work was tantamount to a conversion.