Word: auden
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Christopher Isherwood, that permanently promising young man, seemed during the '30s to be the two dandiest literary dactyls since Joyce's Malachai Mulligan. To earnest literary leftists of the decade, Auden, Spender and Isherwood were pronounced as one word, and in 1935 Isherwood and Auden were acclaimed for an amusing prose and verse play (The Dog Beneath the Skin) that twitted the British Establishment satisfactorily, even if it struck no telling blows in the class war. Isherwood's most promising work came four years later: Goodbye to Berlin, six wistful stories whose curiously passive hero announced that...
...unity of impression. There is less concern with patterened formality here; the use of false- and half-rhyming, for example, hase become so ubiquitous that Mr. Gunn's "schemes" are mainly of assonance. If in 1954 Mr. Gunn startled and delighted a reading public which thirsted simply for "another Auden," he shows signs in his cautious and strangely hesitant present volume of a process of deliberate self-transformation into an individual voice of permanent value...
...convention of the "broken Coriolanus," or more contemporaneously and thus more deceptively, that of the cardiac Sisyphus. The quality of "starriness" central to the title poem and one other, entitled "Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt," is that "disinterested, hard energy" by which Nobody holds Nothing-at-all at bay. Mr. Auden's "ironic points of light" flashed out among a decimated signal corps on the last battlefield of love; Mr. Gunn's stars are self-sufficient. Where Donne tossed and scrambeld known quantities and academically-sanctioned categories, where Shakespeare talked of giving "local habitation" to "airy nothing," Mr. Gunn's landscapes...
Your review, which comprehensively skimmed the subject from Auden to Zen (though how come no Stanley Kunitz, Pulitzer Prize Poet of 1959 and best of the bunch?) moves me to the muse. To all poets, published and unpublished (or nine-tenths of the human race...
...Night. Marriage without love and life without meaning are examined with talent, intelligence and despair by Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura), whose text might be taken from W. H. Auden: "The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed, / The crack in the teacup opens / A lane to the land of the dead...