Word: auden
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...only does Auden seem to be arguing for the kind of standardization he once accused totalitarianism of creating, but he seems to have forfeited--and it sounds at least partly intentional--one of his best poetic voices. Auden was the greatest writer of English light verse since Byron. He could make ideas sound "truer than true" without criminal oversimplification, and in long poems like New Year Letter and Letter to Lord Byron he had proved himself as effective at satirizing the condition of modern man as at prescribing for it. In the process, he came up with such sparkling intellectual...
...think that Auden was reduced to calling Hegel silly and could think of no better way to describe Mozart than "a genius." Sometimes, reading Thank You, Fog, you wonder if Auden isn't parodying himself and his early poetry, from which he grew to feel so remote that he revised many of the most successful passages and even excised some of his most famous poems from new editions. While he once kept light and serious verse considerably apart, in Thank You, Fog he mixes them with such a dead-pan expression that he is rarely very serious or very witty...
...Auden's personal voice seems to have vanished along with his sense of isolation and individuality. From out point, there is a false easiness to his happiness. What has Auden done that he has the right to be so reconciled? Why do the sixties and seventies seem so much less ominous to him than the twenties and thirties...
...Auden's technique as well as his sensibility seems to have atrophied by the time he wrote these last poems. In his early work he'd brought a new terseness to English poetry based on occasionally leaving out articles and inverting the usual structure of the sentence...
...Auden was always more interested in experimenting with syntax than with things like meter and stanza and he was content to pour his unusual grammar into the molds of sonnet, quatrain and blank verse. His chief experiments in Thank You, Fog are with verbs. Poets who write in English, he tells us in one of his "Shorts," "can very easily turn nouns, if we wish, into verbs." He proceeds to do so with gusto, not only to nouns but almost every unit of syntax he can get his hands on. Some examples from a single new poem, "Archeology:" "vacancied long...