Word: andersen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Eternal Juvenile. The applause brought little joy. "I have imagined so much and had so little," Andersen noted in his diary. That complaint sounds like the whine of a child - and, in fact, Andersen remained an eternal juvenile...
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN...
...Children ask of the story what they ask of a dream," observed Poet Randall Jarrell, "that it satisfy their wishes." For more than a century, Hans Christian Andersen has satisfied the wishes of the Western world's children. One hundred years after his death he remains the unsurpassed master of the fairy tale. Who has not smiled ruefully at the imperial victim of The Emperor's New Clothes, or identified with The Princess on the Pea? What youth remains ignorant of Andersen's articulate birds and magic elves? Yet, as Cambridge Professor Elias Bredsdorff brilliantly demonstrates, these...
...hinted at fame. Benefactors sent the adolescent to school, where Hans decided to become a playwright. "You can stand pain if you can write about it," he declared to a friend. The fledgling author became, says Bredsdorff, "a man of deep and apparently irreconcilable contrasts." Heinrich Heine, who observed Andersen in action, called the writer "a tall thin man with hollow sunken cheeks [whose] manner reveals the sort of fawning servility that princes like." All his adult life, Andersen oscillated between vanity and self-abnegation, pride and humility. He was a Christian who rejected the main dogmas of religion...
...time he was 40, the little fairy tales had propelled Hans to the courts and palaces of Europe; in America, he was given a place with the Brothers Grimm. The comparison slighted the Dane. The Germans had collected their stories in the Black Forest; Andersen had pulled his from his brain...