Word: auden
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When asked about his homosexuality, W.H. Auden replied that he was a poet first and a "queen" second. It was a modest response in a less touchy time. Auden was, in fact, a great poet, but for all the public knew or cared, he was just an ordinary homosexual living and working in a world that, by tacit agreement, did not pry into people's sex lives. Even when the media came out of the closet -- pencils erect and cameras hot -- to chase stories about the New Libido, homosexuality was still a taboo subject...
...Jazz quarter unloads some drums from a van and starts setting up behind the Newtowne monument, Merwin says, "You know, Auden said, 'Poetry makes nothing happen.' That's something everybody quotes and it may or may not be true...
...know Auden said this wonderful thing. He said, "You always write out of what you know, but you don't know what you know, but you try to write it." It's a very wise thing to have said. Much wiser than the thing about poetry making nothing happen...
...this magic, righteous. And thus a brute killer portrays himself as a victim, who is therefore infinitely justified. Ethnic cleansing is merely injured virtue catching up. Nothing is more empowering, as they say, than being a victim. It is the Rolls-Royce of self-justifications, a plenary indulgence. W.H. Auden described it as if it were one of Newton's laws: "Those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return...
...Auden had it right about Spain: "That arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot/ Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe." One thinks of this while visiting "Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain," the new | contribution to the 500th anniversary of Columbus by New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a long time, Spain and North Africa were...