The virtuosic opening of W. H. Auden’s ‘Poem XXX’ from March 1930 – with its aircraft, pilots and aerial views – has proved enticingly talismanic for many accounts of interwar literature:

Our dependency on Auden’s observer is established in these first lines; and then the omnipotence of his view, with its ability to target or focus on details, carries the line of sight into the, as yet, peaceful garden party. Later in the poem he has moved much further on, and (with his wirelesses and dance bands and interconnectivity) he negotiates technology and agency, imperative urgency and the possibilities of recounting sensations. These processes mean both trying to delineate where the human stops and where the machine begins, and trying to find a language for the strange sensations the machine enforces upon the human subject. Many have read this poem as overdetermined by its opening, which reveals Auden’s totalitarian desires for allying his poetic viewpoint with the kestrel/bomber, and shows contempt for the little lives below which could be snuffed out at will (Cunningham 1988: 192).

But there is a much better example from Auden’s writing for thinking about the multiple facets of aeriality. It is formally inventive and wildly unsatisfying, as well as being full of jokes that are never quite jokes and (nearly) entirely hawkless: it is ‘The Journal of an Airman’, the central section of The Orators (1932). This journal of a flyer, engaged in both introspection and fomenting an uprising, oscillates between registers of sub-Buchanesque bluff bravado and fin-de-siècle poised camp. It is a bricolage of prose epigrams, sestinas, doggerel, alphabets, genetic diagrams and telegraphese, as well as accomplished descriptions of aircraft maintenance, introspective diary-keeping, wished-for genealogies, letters to wounds, nightmares and fantasias of totalising attacks. But it is also manically elusive, ‘endlessly hinting at a secret narrative the reader is duty bound to track down’ (Smith 1994: 313). The clues come thick and fast – whether scraps of information from apparent spies, the list of possible airbases at ‘Stubba, Smirirndale, Hamar and Sullom’ (1977: 76) or the very idea of reconnaissance.