Word: auden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With his ageless, cigar-store Indian's face, his schoolboyish cleverness and his endless role playing-political poet, lyric poet, religious poet-W. H. Auden was doomed to be regarded as the most promising poet in the English language. Right up to the threshold of old age. In fact, from the moment his first book of poems appeared when he was 23 and just down from Oxford, Auden was permanently assigned the prospect of becoming T. S. Eliot's successor. That has turned out to be practically a lifetime career...
...years passed. The books dutifully appeared, the promise was brilliantly maintained, an assured expectation. But like all crown princes kept waiting too long, Auden suddenly went from being considered promising to being considered a little passe...
...fashion, the clever schoolboy deserves to be read for what he is: an endlessly experimenting, self-revising poet whose true voice is to try all voices, an honestly fluctuating responder to a fluctuating age. City Without Walls, containing poems of the past five years, includes nothing to rank with Auden's best. He appears to be long past the writing of wry love poems like "Lullaby." Perhaps more important, nowhere in this collection does he achieve the delicately blended wit and civilized humanity of "In Praise of Limestone," which may be his most beautiful and enduring shorter poem...
City Without Walls includes occasional verse in which Auden delights. The poet honors Fellow Poet Marianne Moore's 80th birthday, the wedding of a relative, the death of a housekeeper (". . . in a permissive age/ so rife with envy,/ a housekeeper is harder/ to replace than a lover...
...Auden's early collaborator, Christopher Isherwood, recalls: "You could say to him: 'Please write me a double ballade on the virtues of a certain brand of toothpaste, which also contains at least ten anagrams on the names of well-known politicians, and of which the refrain is as follows . . .' Within 24 hours, your ballade would be ready-and it would be good...