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LETTERS FROM ICELAND by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. 253 pages. Random House...
...those who read this minor masterpiece for the first time will be given a lively sense of what it was like to be young in that year and possessed of an eloquent dread of what the near future held. Its two gifted and high-spirited young authors-Wystan Hugh Auden and Louis MacNeice-have, in fact, put time...
Only an eccentric poet like Roy Campbell, the clerical reactionary, has attempted satire in formal rhymed Popian couplets, and perhaps only W. H. Auden has succeeded in didactic eloquence within a variety of formal, traditional stanzas. Doubtless, the exact antipode of Pope's Augustan order would be the artless, extemporaneous effusions that issue from the flower children of the modern coffee house-quite a different breed from an 18th century coffee house. "A thousand years may elapse," Dr. Johnson said, "before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope." With a quarter...
...venerable, Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize novel The Fixer misses greatness by a third. It has the first two requisites, but it omits any purge of the emotions. Malamud brings his hero, Yakov Bok, to the brink of destruction-or salvation-and freezes the action. There, in Auden's phrase, "the seas of pity lie, locked and frozen in each eye." By definition, the film of The Fixer can aspire to be only two-thirds of a great movie. Still, it has within it an irresistible moral force and an impressive cast of characters who have truly Dostoevskian...
...OTHER TWO WORKS. Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia, and Dello Joio's To St. Cecilia, were surpassingly unremarkable. The only marginally interesting section of the Britten piece, which uses a problemmatical Auden text, was a Queen Mab Scherzo passage affording relief from the "flickering flames" of "Blonde Aphrodite." The unidentified soprano soloist thrilled us with another seismic performance whose beauty might be compared to an autumnal wheat field methodically bending to the breeze. Mr. Dello Joio, whose star has been rising ever since his epochal Air Power brought home the Caligulan glory of the air force to the musically...