Word: auden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Auden remarked once that he was "suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love." A prolific reviewer himself, Auden identified four varieties of critic: the prig, "for whom no actual poem is good enough since the only one that would be is the poem he would like to write himself but cannot." Second, the critic's critic--"on the surface he appears to idolize the poet...but his critical analysis of his idol's work is so much more complicated and difficult than the work itself...
Classified in Auden's terms, Monroe K. Spears, author of Disenchanted Island, mixes the qualities of the critic's critic and the maniac. As critic's critic, Spears approaches Auden through close textual study, drawing information from all of Auden's work, from the writers and musicians that influenced him, and from the poet's life. As maniac be is intensely concerned with Auden's language and symbolism. Yet Spear's study of Auden, while exhaustive, intelligent, and scholarly, is also unsatisfactory --unsatisfactory for people who read criticism of poetry in order to understand the poetry's appeal more fully...
Spears' book is, to begin with, the most accurate and comprehensive study that has been done of Auden. The author had access to biographical materials and manuscripts that have not been available to others, and he has read Auden unbelievably carefully. He had difficulties, however, which other critics and biographers do not share. His subject is far from dead: he is alive and still writing copiously. Consequently Spears had to ask himself how much biographical material he could judiciously include without appearing to pry at the poet's private life. Furthermore, if he wants to write another book on Auden...
...radio grew, it was CBS's energetic young president who fed it more new ideas than anyone else. Paley introduced the Columbia Workshop, which broadcast the early works of Thornton Wilder and W. H. Auden. And as World War II began, he initiated the practice of fracturing news programs into brief reports from scattered capitals. After the war-in which he served as colonel in charge of psychological warfare under Dwight D. Eisenhower-he made one of the strongest moves in broadcasting history when he took control of programming away from advertising agencies and outside packagers. From then...
...chancellor of Queen's University in Belfast, succeeding Britain's late World War II strategist, Lord Alanbrooke; Poet and Critic Allen Tate, 64, awarded the $5,000 Chancie and William Booth Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets by a board of such peers as W. H. Auden and Randall Jarrell; Architect Le Corbusier (born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris), 76, promoted to grand officier, next to highest rank of France's Legion of Honor...