Word: clio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Homage to Clio, by W. H. Auden. At 53, Poet Auden may long ago have said everything he had to say, but his talent remains prodigious, and in this collection of poems written during the last five years, his ruminative restatements are often effective...
HOMAGE TO CLIO (91 pp.)-W. H. Auden-Random House...
...Auden may well have said everything of value he ever will say, but on the whole he restates it effectively. Homage to Clio-poems written during the past five years-is the work of the self-revised, settled Auden, but it still offers a reasonably varied mixture. The earlier, brash Auden still reappears occasionally with bits of wise-guy fluff...
...homage to Clio, muse of history and time, takes forms and settled attitudes that only mellowness can explain. No great-man theories of history will satisfy him, no view of the past that dwells on great events and revolves around the doers and shakers of the moment. Clio, he is convinced, cares for the little man, the steady chap who tends the store and provides the hardly discernible backbone that supports the homely burdens. And Auden can make his peace with an entire universe seem like wry resignation...
...Clio is more poetically ruminative than ambitious, makes no attempt to spell out the problems of the human condition that led to the warnings and preachments of The Age of Anxiety. Auden has no palliatives now, no longer looks for comfort or understanding in Marx, Freud or egoistic routes to salvation. Instead, there is an air of hard-won shrewdness and a recourse to God, whose mysterious being is suggested with what might seem Audenesque skepticism if it were not so typically an Auden commitment. For Poet Auden, who frankly admits to his friends that he feels obliged...