Word: auden
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...after publication last year in Sweden, Markings is available in a handsome American edition and a handsome translation by W.H. Auden and a collaborator. The book is as much an anthology as an autobiography, as much a collection of original poetry as of thoughts on religion. It may not be, as an overworked Widener librarian deduced, a study of international law; but even those who have read it will find it difficult to classify...
IfMarkings isn't international law, neither is it-as one might expect-history. Auden remarks in a sympathetic foreward on the relative absence of references to politics and international relations. Hammarskjold, while writing Markings, rose from a brilliant economics student to become Secretary-General of the UN; yet he always subordinates external events to the moral doubts and problems that they engendered. Rather than describing, say, the circumstances of the Congo crisis, he prefers to reflect on the loneliness of power and the necessity of winning the right to be obeyed...
...richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses." The poets have now repaid the compliment. Not since Lincoln's assassination has an American's death inspired so much poetry, the best of which has been collected in this volume. Established poets-W. H. Auden, Richard Eberhart, John Berryman, among others-lent their usual talent; lesser-known poets rose to more than usual eloquence; and all expressed an admiration for J.F.K. that undoubtedly would have shocked him: Robert Hazel ("President I love as my grandfather loved Lincoln"); Ruth Yorck ("We may stop worrying./ Our best...
Most of the poets try to salvage some meaning from the assassination. W. H. Auden's quiet meditation has been set to music by Stravinsky and will have us U.S. première in New York on Dec. 6: Why then? Why there? Why thus, we cry, did he die? The Heavens are silent. What he was, he was: What he is fated to become Depends on us. Remembering his death, How we choose to live Will decide its meaning. When a just man dies, Lamentation and praise, Sorrow...
Lewis said written ballads and other lyric poems have often successfully transformed this "story lyric" without using a tune, "although it helps if you have a folk tune in your head." He quoted poems from Yeats, Graves and Auden as examples...