Word: auden
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...testified in his poem "A Part of Speech," "I was raised by the cold that, to warm my palm,/ gathered my fingers around a pen." In 1972 the Soviets decided they could get along without a Joseph Brodsky. Against his objections he was shipped to Austria, where W.H. Auden, then living in Kirchstetten, helped the uprooted poet on his way to the U.S. There Brodsky became an ornament on university faculties, a familiar voice on the lecture circuit, a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a recipient of a $208,000 MacArthur Foundation award...
...heaven that segregates poets and prose writers suits Brodsky. The supre macy of prosody is a theme he plays backward, forward and sideways throughout his book. If metrical language is the pinnacle of civilization, Brodsky is free to put poets at the top of the heap. He anoints Auden as "the greatest mind of the twentieth century," a brash though not unattractive idea if readers allow themselves to be swept along by Brodsky's passionate discourse on Auden's premonitory war poem "September 1, 1939." The work is reimagined rather than reduced by the usual critical method...
...into his own language." He chose Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, then went on to Hamlet. In America most major modern poets have obeyed Gide's injunction. The result is a vigorous body of English verse that encompasses such varied sources as Icelandic epics (W.H. Auden), La Fontaine's fables (Marianne Moore), Brazilian poetry (Elizabeth Bishop), Russian lyrics (Stanley Kunitz) and contemporary Hungarian poetry (William Jay Smith...
...speculations about why people get married. Larkin seems to have seized upon each assignment as an opportunity to puncture what has been overpraised, to praise what has been overlooked, or to make some wry self-revelation. Sometimes he does all three at once, as in his discussion of W.H. Auden. He recalls finding the famous older writer "frightening" when he met him, but he does not hesitate to slap down Auden's post-1940 American output as "too verbose to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving," well below the energetic, socially committed English Auden...
...dishonest decade" was the way W.H. Auden viewed the '30s; he was thinking of politics. Clifford Odets saw those years as a time when "every house was lousy with lies and hate"; he was thinking of the middle class. From the vantage point of a half-century, that appears to be all he ever thought about. It is not the most flattering way to remember the man who was once the lodestar of the Old Left. But then neither is the revival of his melodrama Awake and Sing...