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This Music Crept by me upon the Waters.

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First trade edition, inscribed ‘To Geoffrey Bridson through whom alone it happened / with admiration Archibald MacLeish’.

MacLeish’s introduction explains the history of the play: ‘This Music [etc] … was printed in Botteghe Oscure in Rome in April of this year and produced, as a radio play, by Geoffrey Bridson on the Third Programme of the British Broadcasting Corporation in June … the BBC Third Programme will produce it again this fall’. The play was broadcast was on 11 June 1953, and again on 3 November. There was also a signed limited edition of 100 copies.

Even before they were colleagues in the Features and Drama Department of the BBC, Bridson had included MacNeice alongside Auden and others in ‘The Modern Muse’, his sixty-minute broadcast of contemporary poetry in 1938. Bridson and MacNeice were among the most talented members of ‘Features’ from 1941 – MacNeice retuned from America for the purpose – and their professional careers ran in parallel through the 40s and 50s. Like Bridson, MacNeice quickly appreciated the unique advantages, and restrictions, of the medium, writing documentaries, creative work, and analyses of radio itself. Together MacNeice and Bridson were briefly drafted over to the television drama department in 1958.