Word: auden
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...leads a zesty performance of a piece that, like so much English music, makes a strength of its provincialism: it has medieval and folk echoes, strikes a resolutely winsome and pastoral note, and is steeped in native literature (with settings of verses by poets from Herrick and Blake to Auden). Britten composed it when he was 35, and he took such an obvious delight in the piquant vocal and instrumental textures that they seem to have bloomed freshly under...
...something more complex than chanting "No more nukes," although that message is undeniably in the work. The cosmology he assembles is as elaborate and beautiful as any set to poetry since Yeats wrote of gyres and phases of the moon. It also dances with humor. The late W.H. Auden, now an onlooker in heaven, plays an owlish Vergil to Merrill's Dante. "Did you realize," Merrill asks, "that people have plutonium in their lymph glands?" Auden taps back: SURELY ONLY THE BETTER CLASSES...
...other and a dirty old raincoat into one more hotel lobby. It came to seem that this wasn't a worthy way for a grown man to spend his life. You have good seats, sure, but you're always on the sidelines. You're not making anything. Auden has a wonderful essay?it's in The Dyer's Hand?about how young people want to be writers. He says it's something the Greeks understood. The writer is somebody who makes something with his own hands. And he draws the distinction between being a maker and a drudge. Work...
...painful maturity. Its power comes from the Ditter conclusion that skill on the playing field is not synonymous with character. There have been scores of books on the superstars of every sport; success Breeds fans. Failure has only a few aficionados, and Jordan is one of the finest. In Auden's phrase, he sings of human unsuccess, and in the song turns case his tories on the defeated into a kind of triumph...
...library became his refuge and salvation. Between the wars, the don's reputation as a researcher and writer grew; T.S. Eliot sought his articles on Marxism, presented with a historian's detachment; W.H. Auden befriended him. By the '50s he was famous. Today Rowse laces his conversation with recollections of the mighty: "Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt spoke much clearer English than Winston, who had a speech impediment as a child and always lisped somewhat...