Word: icelander
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even a tourist-class guidebook-the kind written in hoked-up feature writer's prose-furnishes vicarious travel. Letters from Iceland is a first-class VIP travel book written by two poets; it provides not only the usual armchair transport but also a vicarious voyage into the past...
LETTERS FROM ICELAND by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. 253 pages. Random House...
...poets, cruising the dormant volcanic cones of Iceland on ponies, never lost their awareness of the active political volcanoes of Europe, which had first erupted in Spain. The last line in the book, "Still I drink your health before/The gun-butt raps upon the door," crystallizes in a phrase the tone of the period. Although no gun-butt ever knocked on the doors of Auden or MacNeice, the two poets were better prophets than most politicians. They sang of Armageddon...
...surface, of course, politics and history have little to do with a simple, slightly offbeat excursion to Iceland. But for the two young poets the laws of metaphor applied. The ancient island democracy was a place where "Ravens from their walls of shale/Cruise around the rotting whale." Europe was the beached behemoth and the ravens, the Blackshirts and the SS. Out of their few weeks spent getting saddle sores on bad-tempered Icelandic ponies or in rattletrap buses on boulder-paved roads, eating terrible meals of smoked mutton in smokier hovels, Auden and MacNeice re-created an odd and magical...
MacNeice is dead now, and Auden, an immeasurably more talented poet, has become a happier, wiser traveler, with a preference for balmier summer spots-the island of Ischia near Naples, for instance, and the civilized hills of Austria. But in Letters from Iceland, the two precocious patriarchs of an Oxford poetic school spoke with the same youthful, irreverent voice. The book is probably the only successful verse partnership since the old English firm of Beaumont & Fletcher closed shop. It is, moreover, an object lesson for all dull dogs who could find nothing more exciting in a place like Iceland than...