Word: icelanders
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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...
...Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the U.S. and West Germany...