Word: auden
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Claiming ownership on one side are play wrights W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. They have left the other claimant, director Bill Rauch, with a verse play which popularizes Marxism in a social and political critique of pre-World War Two bourgeois Europe...
Russell's great inspiration is to solve the paradox at the opera's core, that of a modern work in courtly guise. If the music will not carry the dramatic load, then the action must. The director updates the splendid, rather literary W.H. Auden-Chester Kallmann libretto from 18th century to contemporary England without altering a word of text. Realized by Designer Derek Jarman, the images are vivid and immediate, painted in hard, splashy colors to evoke a drug-and crime-ridden world...
...Auden is a textbook case drawn largely from the poet's autobiography-of-sorts, A Certain World. The book is an alphabetical listing of subjects close to Auden's heart, and the psychological evidence is so blatant that one should expect an ambush. Edel plunges ahead. Under "Castration Complex," he finds a reference to "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb," whose mother warns him that he will lose his favorite fingers if he does not stop his infantile habit. He does not, and in comes "the great, long, red-legged scissors-man" to carry out the sentence...
...Under D, Auden describes a dream in which his appendix is to be removed. Instead, the doctor cuts off "the arm of an old lady who was going to do me an injury." Mommy dearest? Of course, and Edel does not fail to evoke the emasculating female. How much weight Auden, a homosexual, gave to primal imagery is open to question. An artist must care more about what he makes than what he is. Auden put it right when he told a friend, "I am a poet first and a queen second...
Speaking in her new tongue, she cultivated influential writers: Robert Lowell, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, W.H. Auden. Writing in a new manner, she searched out The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As Young-Bruehl observes, Arendt sustained throughout "500 dense, difficult pages a deep, agonized 'Ach!' before the deeds of infamy she analyzed." The book was an angry, detailed journey over Europe's pitchforked roads to "radical evil": imperialism, racism and antiSemitism...