Word: auden
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...other spy novel these might be fatal lapses. But Le Carre is not any other spy novelist. Throughout, he is aware not only of the moral squalor that can attend espionage - but also of Auden's ironic observation: "We are left alone with our day, and the tune is short and/ History to the defeated/ May say Alas but cannot help or pardon...
Beckett is photogenic; perhaps only Ezra Pound is more so, the secret being not to care what people think of you. This scorn for public taste seems distinctly 20th century. Beckett won't acknowledge the camera, and defies close-up. His wrinkles are far more impressive than W.H. Auden's; Beckett's struggle to cover the bone, Auden's are ornamental. It's a neat twist to find Beckett and Buster Keaton together in one photo (Keaton played the protagonist in Beckett's Film)--Keaton the supreme silent comedian, Beckett (equally a master of comedy) minimizing theatre toward a condition...
NONFICTION: Charmed Lives, Michael Korda ∙ Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov ∙ The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe ∙ The White Album, Joan Didion ∙ W.H. Auden, Charles Osborne ∙ Zebra, Clark Howard
...were silly like us," Auden wrote of Irish Poet William Butler Yeats, but the truth is that Yeats was sillier, more willing to appear foolish and embrace mumbo jumbo in service to his art. Auden's way was very different, circumspect; his poetry achieved greatness but never reached out for Yeatsian grandeur. He wrote...
...Auden now began to give readings of his poems at universities and colleges. He was one of the first poets to do so on a regular ... basis, and could fairly be said to have played his part in bringing into existence that traveling circuit which gave employment to so many poets, British and American, during the fifties and the sixties. He also made it known that he was available to lecture, provided that the fee was right. The lecture he gave at Harvard in 1947 on Don Quixote as part of a series commemorating the quatercentenary of the birth...