Word: auden
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LETTERS FROM ICELAND, by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. A minor masterpiece, written in 1936 when two talented, irreverent young poets knocked about above the tree line and put time...
...active political volcanoes of Europe, which had first erupted in Spain. The last line in the book, "Still I drink your health before/The gun-butt raps upon the door," crystallizes in a phrase the tone of the period. Although no gun-butt ever knocked on the doors of Auden or MacNeice, the two poets were better prophets than most politicians. They sang of Armageddon...
...shale/Cruise around the rotting whale." Europe was the beached behemoth and the ravens, the Blackshirts and the SS. Out of their few weeks spent getting saddle sores on bad-tempered Icelandic ponies or in rattletrap buses on boulder-paved roads, eating terrible meals of smoked mutton in smokier hovels, Auden and MacNeice re-created an odd and magical journey compounded of poems (satirical, epistolatory and familiar), letters, guidebook information, parodies, private jokes and public protest...
...minor decoration of the original volume, unhappily left out in the re-edition, were Auden's hit-or-miss photographs. Its principal treasure was and is his long poem, Letter to Lord Byron. Few poets since Byron have tried to crack the great romantic's seven-foot whip, and only Auden among Englishmen has succeeded, as here...
MacNeice is dead now, and Auden, an immeasurably more talented poet, has become a happier, wiser traveler, with a preference for balmier summer spots-the island of Ischia near Naples, for instance, and the civilized hills of Austria. But in Letters from Iceland, the two precocious patriarchs of an Oxford poetic school spoke with the same youthful, irreverent voice. The book is probably the only successful verse partnership since the old English firm of Beaumont & Fletcher closed shop. It is, moreover, an object lesson for all dull dogs who could find nothing more exciting in a place like Iceland than...