Word: auden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Because life is so unpredictable, you can never know what will happen," Auden said. "I try to make some order out of the chaos...
...Auden traveled to Berlin in 1927 and was joined by Isherwood two years later. "My parents said I could go abroad for year," he recalled. "The generation before mine was influenced heavily by French culture. I went to ??????? Paris. As it turned out, it was an interesting time to go. In the midtwenties, you can't imagine how safe life seemed. My father had been at the war, but I had never thought any thing might happen to him. At Berlin, I realized the foundations were shaking." And at Berlin, surrounded by the hysteria, madness, and mission that culminated...
...Spain, as one of the leftist intellectuals who supported-and often died for-the Loyalist cause, that Auden wrote his most political poetry. A left sympathizer, but never committing himself to Communism, he celebrated the relentless pace of Marx's History. Disillusioned and frightened by the approaching Nazi apocalypse, infatuated with a romantic conception of the working class, cagier to write for a Cause, Auden and his friends wrote poetry of violent revolution. Twenty years later, editing a collection of his works Auden amitted "Spain 1937," one of his most famous poems...
...Spain 1937"] is a very wicked thing-the statement that History is always on the side of the winner," Auden explained. "War may be necessary," and again he smiled, "but it's still murder...
Necessary? murder? In January, 1968, Auden was quoted in Newsweek as saying that American troops must remain in Vietnam. "I thought politically that one would have to stay till there was negotiation; I didn't say I supported the war," he remarked. "But things of course have gotten a lot worse. What we should do is get out, after taking precautions that people can leave the country if they want to." Auden has never written about Vietnam, "because one should write about what one knows." He has not been to Vietnam, he said, and he doesn't know enough about...