Word: auden
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Largely unknown, he has enjoyed the esteem of his peers. Lawrence Durrell praised him as a major force; Auden ascribed Cavafy's power to surmount translation to "a tone of voice," the revelation of "a person with a unique perspective on the world." That perspective is keenly evoked in a new translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. And as a bonus, the first English biography of Cavafy has just been published. In it Robert Liddell scrupulously assembles and sifts the frugal details of the poet's life...
...owners, marital misadventures and a one-season suspension for consorting with known gamblers. Yet if Leo the Lip is to be recalled by future generations, it may be for his signal contribution to literature. There he sits in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, sandwiched between John Betjeman and W.H. Auden: "Nice guys finish last. Leo Durocher (1906-)." As Durocher marches toward the close of the parenthesis, he recalls the flaky, competitive career that made him, for millions of fans, the man they loved to hate...
...Like these central characters, Kosinski once fled the hell of war and totalitarianism; like them, he suffered unnamed-and perhaps unnameable-trauma. Cockpit seems to be a refraction of those anguished early years. If it is, then the novel's epigraph need not be from Dostoyevsky but from Auden, whose insight remains the subtext for all acts of vengeance: land the public know What all schoolchildren learn Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return...
...succeeded. She has written one of those windy, overweight Southern books -the Gone With the Wind syndrome -that can do everything wrong except bore the reader. For seven indefatigable years she has tracked her subject: to New York City, where Carson lived in a household that included W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Richard Wright, among others; to the obligatory artists' colonies (Yaddo, Bread Loaf); even to London and Paris. Early on, she grabs her fey and monstrous main character by the toe and never lets go. The ghost of McCullers does the rest...
...Night and Morning (1938), Clarke turned to the raging forge of his own mind. Hot in the smithy of Irish poetry, he began a new mode heavily influenced by modernist poets. His elongated narrative lines turned to the crisp, dry style of poets like Auden--nouns are used as verbs, sentences are elipsed and inverted. In the very earliest of these poems, Clarke subtly reveals a kind of tormented agnosticism, as in this poem about the crucifixion of Christ: An open mind disturbs the soul, And in disdain I turn my back Upon the sun that makes a show...