Word: fogs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Shortly after dawn last Wednesday, a Greek government police car sliced through the thick fog and stopped in front of the luxurious seaside villa of George Papadopoulos. Dictator of Greece for 6½ years and leader of the 1967 colonels' coup, Papadopoulos had been overthrown in the generals' coup last November, and three weeks ago, he was placed under house arrest by the civilian regime of Premier Constantine Caramanlis. Nonetheless, Papadopoulos had planned to run for Parliament in elections later this month, and there were rumors that his political ambitions went much further. To the policeman who knocked...
...classic fatique." It may be unfair to judge Auden's recent poetry until we can read his as yet unpublished work, particularly his love poetry, but it seems as if our verdict in his case must be one of fatigue. There are seventeen poems in Thank You, Fog--few of them are bad and they are all characteristic, but they are enervated, written on a lower energy level. Perhaps the softening for Auden thanks numbed his perceptions and dulled his creative powers. Although Auden was only 66 when he died last September, he was clearly not a man who expected...
...think that Auden was reduced to calling Hegel silly and could think of no better way to describe Mozart than "a genius." Sometimes, reading Thank You, Fog, you wonder if Auden isn't parodying himself and his early poetry, from which he grew to feel so remote that he revised many of the most successful passages and even excised some of his most famous poems from new editions. While he once kept light and serious verse considerably apart, in Thank You, Fog he mixes them with such a dead-pan expression that he is rarely very serious or very witty...
Auden was always more interested in experimenting with syntax than with things like meter and stanza and he was content to pour his unusual grammar into the molds of sonnet, quatrain and blank verse. His chief experiments in Thank You, Fog are with verbs. Poets who write in English, he tells us in one of his "Shorts," "can very easily turn nouns, if we wish, into verbs." He proceeds to do so with gusto, not only to nouns but almost every unit of syntax he can get his hands on. Some examples from a single new poem, "Archeology:" "vacancied long...
...emotion instead of ideas--it seems that, after a certain point in his life, Auden became happy. As he explains in "Lullaby," he was "released at last/From lust for other bodies,/Rational and reconciled." Some poets can write under these circumstances; Auden apparently could not. Auden wrote Thank You, Fog after the long exiles of his life--in Weimar Germany, Iceland, and New York--had ended and he was invited back to Oxford. As a long-time expatriate and as a homosexual, Auden could never have been Poet Laureate. Yet, by the end of his life, he would have been...