Word: auden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year history, but the recognition of his talent is by now a familiar story. His early poems were championed by such older cultural luminaries as the poet Anna Akhmatova. Getting off a plane in Vienna as a new emigre, Brodsky was taken under the protection and guidance of W.H. Auden, who had a summer house nearby. Within months he found himself in Ann Arbor, a poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan assigned, as he later whimsically wrote, "to wear out/ the patience of the ingenuous local youth." Since then he has lived steadily in the U.S. (he became...
...themselves have ever avoided politics as subject matter. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, all found ways to hail or rage against kings and governments through their work. Yeats, unpolitical as anyone could look in his fluffy neckties, wrote stinging political lines. As did Robert Lowell. As does Seamus Heaney. W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939 is a beautiful muddle of a poem on Europe in the shadow of war. Bertolt Brecht's To Posterity, about Germany under the Nazis, is clear as a bell...
...some striking encounters along the way. In Paris he discusses Indochina with Andre Malraux and observes that the Frenchman has a tic that "is something like a snort from the nose, and when he becomes excited and voluble, it sounds like the exhaust from a car." He visits W.H. Auden in a completely unheated New York City loft. "Wystan started up some queer kind of little stove, but we sat in our overcoats and our breath went up in vapor." Vladimir Nabokov comes for a visit, and they start arguing about how various English and Russian words should be pronounced...
...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...