Word: auden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Auden's "The Opera Addict" amusingly probes the nature of opera. "The ideal operatic hero and heroine fall in love with the most unsuitable person they can find...they keep appearing at the most embarrassing and improbable times and places possible; they persistently and shamelessly make scenes in public...
...Auden advocates a "just for the hell of it" attitude toward opera, as the means of coming to view as "positive advantages of the medium" the "unromantic physical appearance of the lovers, the improbability of the plots, the suspension of critical action while the singers get things off their chests, and the palpably sham scenery...
...staying power of a single poem that lodges in the race's memory. Keats wrote four or five such poems, which possess that special magic without which a poem is merely verse. Although current poetic taste leans to the sinewy complexities of Donne and Eliot and Auden, Keats probably draws and has drawn more young readers to poetry than any other writer except Shakespeare...
Died. Louis MacNeice, 55, handsome Irish-born, sports-loving Greek scholar who, in the early 1930s, was briefly celebrated as one of the brash young Oxford poets, along with Auden, Spender and C. Day Lewis, who stood traditional English verse on its ear by mixing slang and sardonic wit, toff talk and tough thinking to comment on England between the wars; of pneumonia; in London. During World War II, MacNeice drifted away from poetry to become one of the BBC's top scriptwriters and producers; but his early verse, which he enjoyed writing "as one enjoys swimming or swearing...
...have split his audience into two camps-the admiring and the appalled-with the critics generally on his side. He has a talent for finding high inspiration in avant-garde literature (Allen Ginsberg's Howl inspired his recent Antifone per Orchestra) and for attracting notable collaborators. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (the librettists of Stravinsky's Rake's Progress) wrote the libretto for his Elegy for Young Lovers, and the collaboration remains among his happiest experiences. "Auden said that a libretto should be a love letter to the composer," he recalls. "I found that very touching...