About Joseph Auslander
Joseph Auslander (1897-1965) was an American poet and writer. The poetry of Joseph Auslander, who was in 1937 the first poet to hold the official post at the Library of Congress, then called the “poetry chair,” is dark and ornate and imitative of an earlier period of Gothic romanticism in American poetry. Auslander was born in 1897 in what he described as the slums of Philadelphia, and spent three years as a boy working in a sweatshop before distinguishing himself in a Brooklyn high school as a student with literary promise. He went on to study at Harvard and the Sorbonne and started teaching poetry at Columbia in 1929. He wrote six large volumes of poetry during his lifetime and two novels, which he coauthored with his second wife, the poet Audrey Wurdemann, who was his assistant throughout his nearly four years at the Library.Auslander’s first collection of poetry, Sunrise Trumphets, was published in 1924. He was the first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in United States Library of Congress from 1937 and 1941. Auslander's best-known work is The Unconquerables which has been published in 1943, a collection of poems addressed to the German-occupied countries of Europe. He often wrote about war, and his poetry was used to sell U.S. war bonds during World War II. He also served as the poetry editor for the North American Review and The Measure. Auslander was honoured with the Robert Frost Prize for Poetry.
In 1941, he launched, with the third Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, the first recorded readings at the Library called “The Poet in a Democracy,” which is one of the oldest poetry reading series in the country. The inaugural reader was Robinson Jeffers, who, in the first public appearance he had ever agreed to make, gave a short speech declaring,“It may be the destiny of America to carry culture and freedom across the twilight of another dark age” and to “keep alive, through everything, our ideal values, of freedom and courage, mercy and tolerance.”
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Having been appointed to the task of building in our national Library for the People of the United States a permanent sanctuary for the manuscripts and memorabilia of the poets of our tongue, I take the liberty of inviting your cooperation. Such a room, dedicated to the best and noblest utterances of the best and noblest minds, is intended not only as a storehouse of treasures to inspire and instruct the multitude that daily throng our doors; it is to serve as one more heartening sign, in a confused and darkened world, of the power of the poets and dramatists, the glory of our ideals and aspirations.
