Orwell’s poetry explores many of the themes you would expect from him given the topics of his novels: poverty, industrialism, war and politics, however surprisingly the man had a soft spot and has a significant amount of works focused on nature and a couple on love, whereas is generally very cynical and makes claims that when the end of mankind comes he cares not. All in all I found and read seventeen of Orwell’s poems, five of these I had to transcribe from handwritten manuscripts with no typeface being available for such online. This indicates a the sheer lack of critical interest in Orwell’s poetry and I suppose such is for a reason. Orwell isn’t known for his poetry whatsoever and there is a reason for that. He simply wasn’t a very good poet. A lot of his structures and pacing is clumsy and one of the only ones that stood out as good poetry; ‘St Andrew’s Day 1935’, is the poem used in ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’ anyway and hence has an identity beyond the collection of Orwell’s poetic works.