According to biographer D. J. Taylor, the young Orwell displayed ‘an enthusiasm for poetry that in [his] formative years seems to have been as least as strong as any desire to write fiction’. Orwell’s poetry is not among his best known – or most highly praised – work, but nonetheless shares similar concerns to (and displays the dry sense of humour present in) his prose. Mere foothills in the range of Orwell’s work perhaps – but building up to the summits later scaled.
Poems by Orwell
- A dressed man and a naked man (1933)
- A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been (1935)
- Dear Friend, allow me for a little while (c. 1927, flickr)
- Kitchener
- My Love and I (flickr)
- On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory (1934)
- Romance (1925, flickr)
- Sometimes in the middle autumn days (The Adelphi, 1933)
- St Andrew’s Day, 1935 (also published in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936)
- Suggested by a Tooth Paste Advertisement (c. 1918-1919)
- Summer-like for an instant (1933)
- The Italian Soldier Shook My Hand (1939, first published in ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, 1943)
- The Lesser Evil (1922-27, flickr)
- The Pagan (1918)
- The Photographer (1920, flickr)
- The Wounded Cricketer (not by Walt Whitman – c. 1920, flickr)
- When the Franks Have Lost Their Sway (c. 1927, flickr)
Essays by Orwell
- Nonsense Poetry (Tribune, 1945)
- Poetry and the microphone (New Saxon Pamphlet, 1945)
- W. B. Yeats (Horizon, 1943)
- Inside the Whale (1932)
- Rudyard Kipling (Horizon, 1942)
- (In response to T.S. Eliot)