Word: auden
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...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...
...first major production he designed was the 1975 Glyndebourne version of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, its libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Hockney, never embarrassed about paying homage to his aesthetic hearth gods, did the whole thing in the manner of Hogarth's engravings of that moral phantasmagoria set in 18th century England, stylizing the sets into crosshatched black-and-white etchings. Their graphic wit and punch reached a memorable climax in the final scene, where poor Tom Rakewell, insane at last, finds himself in Bedlam. The wall is covered with graffiti, each...
These works, and the other 74 tales in the collection, have become secular cabala, subject to endless sifting and interpretation. Hermann Hesse judged Kafka's works "an urgent formulation of the question of religious existence." W.H. Auden called Kafka "the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs." André Gide did not know what to admire most, "the naturalistic presentation of an imaginary world, or the daring turn to the mysterious." But Edmund Wilson was not ready to admire either: "Kafka is being wildly...