Word: auden
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Dates: during 1934-1934
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Between Poet Robinson and Poets Spender and Auden lies the gulf of the War. Much murmured of late by the literati, these two new names were last fortnight introduced to a U. S. audience. Tories in their own country (England) have already damned them as bumptious poetasters. To plain readers, who find Poet Robinson's verbal sinuosities occasionally obscure, they may appear largely unintelligible. But youthful amateurs of poetry will con them with interest, sometimes with enthusiasm. Their elders will not be quick to applaud either their language or their sentiments: both grate harshly...
Less lyric than his fellow-poet, Auden writes with more explicit scorn of "the old gang," dedicates his book with the forthright sentiment...
...Both Auden and Spender are speakers for a generation that is sated with the old order, hungry for the new chaos. Poet Robinson writes on the assumption that the proper study of the poet is the inner man, and in his poems he soliloquizes with sad coherence on the tangled emotional morals of a static mankind. Poets Auden and Spender are fiercely, often incoherently impatient of all that. Poet Robinson is a calm skeptic; they, passionate disbelievers. More satirical, less serious a poet than Spender, Auden half-fills his book with prose patches: a mock oration, an airman...
...Authors. Because they are poets, Robinson, Spender and Auden are not typical citizens of their respective countries. Old Poet Robinson, Maine-born, Harvard-bred, chose the uncrowded profession of poet at an early age. Establishing himself in Manhattan "in a sordid stall on the fifth floor of a dreary house," he kept himself and Pegasus fed by doing odd jobs, was once a construction inspector on the subway. Only U.S. poet ever reviewed by a U.S. President, Robinson got more attention when Theodore Roosevelt wrote an encomium of his poetry in the Outlook, and offered him a consulship in Mexico...
Young Poets Wyant Hugh Auden and Stephen Spender, both in their 20's, were contemporaries at Oxford. Each dedicates his book to one Christopher Isherwood. Auden "went down" from Christ Church in 1928, is now teaching at a school near Malvern. Spender left the university three years later, after failing his degree. With an independent income, he can afford to be a professed poet, is at present working on a study of the relation of contemporary writing to political movements and a poetic drama, The Death of a Judge...