Word: auden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cambridge University on a Henry Fellowship just as Chamberlain was disgracing himself at Munich. He met Harold Laski but argued with the radical political scientist about his soft views on the Soviet Union. At the opening of a play called On the Frontier, the authors, Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, sat directly in front of Schlesinger--Auden scribbling notes to Isherwood (which Isherwood could not read in the dark) and furiously smoking Camels, while John Maynard Keynes stared down impassively from a balcony...
...University on a Henry Fellowship just as Chamberlain was disgracing himself at Munich. He met Harold Laski but argued with the radical political scientist about his soft views on the Soviet Union. At the opening of a play called "On the Frontier," the authors, Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden, sat directly in front of Schlesinger - Auden scribbling notes to Isherwood (which Isherwood could not read in the dark) and furiously smoking Camels, while John Maynard Keynes stared down impassively from a balcony...
...Auden wrote a splendid poem called "1 September 1939," which, in the original version, he ended with the line, "We must love another, or die." He expunged the line in later editions, judging, rightly, that it rang false, sentimental. I do not think it is the business of the law to tell us, "We must love one another, or else." Nor is it the business of law to forbid us to hate one another...
...that's not the half of it. Wanting something, wanting it in the future and wanting it at a particular time in the future are also tricky distinctions. As W. H. Auden observed in his famous treatise on love, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth): "I will love you forever, swears the poet. I will love you at 4:15 p.m. next Tuesday: is that still as easy?" Running headlong into our future plans can sometimes cause a bit of a train wreck...
Imagine an Auden less reticent about the (male) objects of his affection, or a Philip Larkin shedding his librarian's tweeds for a leather jacket and motorcycle boots. Such imagined metamorphoses might give new readers some sense of the lively pleasures awaiting them in the poetry of Thom Gunn, 70. Those who have watched his distinguished career evolve over nearly half a century need, of course, no such introduction; news that a new book of Gunn's poems has arrived is enough to start their celebrations...