Word: auden
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...fashionable, from gargoyles to saints. At the same time he sniped at critics' darlings like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. (Citizen Kane was "exciting but hammy.") Above all, he urged the moviegoer's attention away from plot and social message and toward the vital energy occurring, as W.H. Auden wrote of Brueghel's Icarus, "Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree...
...intervene. When there is a typhoon in Burma or an earthquake in China, the world knows what questions to ask. What can we do? How can we help? But when a calamity is preventable and unfolding systematically before our eyes, nations sit on their hands. The world, as W.H. Auden wrote in his beautiful poem Musée des Beaux Arts, "turns away quite leisurely from the disaster...
...including gender, politics, religion, and, ultimately, poetry itself. Paley was laregly known as a short story writer—her “Collected Stories” was a Pulitzer finalist—and as a political activist. Yet she began her career as a poet, studying under W.H. Auden as a young adult. Here, at the end of her life, Paley makes a final return to poetry, and the medium seems appropriate to her task. In her hands, the ability of poetry to distill itself into one thought or one emotion becomes a powerful tool; her thoughts, stripped...
...Allen, Strathairn and the movie's other middle-age co-stars photograph about 20 years older than they did in their last films; Scott Glenn's face has the bas-relief road-map look of the aged W.H. Auden. That's partly to isolate the younger Damon generationally as well as geographically from his handlers, but mainly because Greengrass and cinematographer Oliver Wood are going for a verismo feel. The director, who last year did the excellent docudrama United 93, has defined his Bourne location work as guerrilla filmmaking - using concealed cameras in "wild" situations - and he overuses the hand...
...stuff. Don't feel bad, hardly anybody does. To hit the best-seller list for verse, a book has to sell only around 30 copies. Poetry is the spinach in America's media diet: good for you, occasionally baked into other, tastier dishes (like the cameo that W.H. Auden's Funeral Blues made in Four Weddings and a Funeral) but rarely consumed on its own. In the hierarchy of cultural pursuits it sits somewhere just below classical music and just above clogging...