Word: auden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...least promoted to emeritus status by a generation that has little patience with the cerebral and the courtly. Scores of collegiate poets and critics questioned by TIME correspondents on campuses across the U.S. found T.S. Eliot "irrelevant," Robert Frost "too provincial," Dylan Thomas a "phony Welshman," W.H. Auden "a poet for the middle-aged." These men still have admirers, but they lack followers. If among the enshrined elders the seating order has been changed-as in the latest photograph of the Soviet Presidium-William Carlos Williams is the new chief because he dealt with commonplace objects by using common speech...
...vary enormously with the turf. The favored French mode is the grittily realistic roman policier, in which the detective, like Simenon's Inspector Maigret, is presumed human, hence flawed. In England both criminal and captor implicitly play the gentlemanly hare-and-hounds game-a legacy of what W.H. Auden called the "guilty vicarage" tradition...
...RAKES PROGRESS, with its Stravinsky score, its W. H. Auden-Chester Kallman libretto, and its ultimate genesis in Hogarth, is one of the most interesting artistic ventures of the century. Tom Rakewell is portrayed as an innocent, even likeable young man, who is led astray by the conniving servant, Nick Shadow, and robbed of his riches and his innocence. After Rakewell has scorned his true love and taken up with the bearded lady, Shadow reveals himself as a diabolical agent, and plays Tom a card game, with Rakewell's soul as the stakes. Although Tom wins at this operatic Seventh...
...Auden's touch in the libretto is the saving grace of the plot, which is actually not as ludicrous as it sounds, The book is extremely well done, enough to carry even the weak moments in the music...
What is the purpose of poetry? One well-qualified practitioner of the art supplied an answer at a doctors' meeting in Manhattan. Said Poet Wystan H. Auden, 63: "To enable people a little better to enjoy life, or a little better to endure it." What is a minor poet? The furrowed face broke into a smile: "If you take two poems by one man and read them, and you can't tell which was written first, that is a minor poet." The subject of education evoked another satisfyingly sweeping statement: "Political history is far too criminal a subject...