Word: auden
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nature of his triumph, though, is elusive and peculiar. Larkin and his contemporaries inherited the scorched earth of modernism -- the towering shadow cast by Yeats, the multilingual complexities introduced by Eliot and Pound, the daunting technical virtuosity of Auden. Starting out, Larkin had the good taste to imitate all these (except Pound), with some Dylan Thomas thrown in for good measure. He got out from under his predecessors only when he learned to lower his voice, to submerge complexities of thought and feeling beneath a serene, limpid surface...
Brownmiller attempts a novelist's overview, tracing the domestic tyrannies that slowly escalate to mutilation and death. But her squabbling adults have little more personality than Punch and Judy, and their maltreated daughter is a mere shadow. Waverly Place takes 294 pages to express what W.H. Auden did in a quatrain: "I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn,/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return...
...want to quibble too much with Hirsch's choice of entries. (Although I wish W.H. Auden and Charles Schulz's Peanuts had made the list.) I'm not trying to harp on his errors. (Although the good citizens of Tallahassee will be thrilled to note that Jacksonville is listed as the capital of Florida.) But we must be wary of a 600-page list of information with an implicit message that says "You must read me." Perhaps knowledge is power, but is that knowledge confined to the superficial identifications E.D. Hirsch finds important? We should keep in mind another educational...
BRITTEN: PAUL BUNYAN (Virgin). Sir Benjamin's tuneful first opera was conceived in 1939 as a Broadway show with a libretto by W.H. Auden. It never played the Great White Way, but it comes to life under Philip Brunelle's baton...
Samuel Hynes, 63, is a literary critic (The Auden Generation, The Edwardian Turn of Mind) and a professor of English at Princeton. These accomplishments do not figure in his narrative, which ends a few months after the war and Hynes' service as a Marine dive-bomber pilot in the Pacific. Looking back, the author is convinced that members of his generation, who grew up not in college or at jobs but training for battle, shared a secret that "made us different from those who were older or younger than ourselves, or who were...