Word: musee
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...Wystan Hugh Auden is the only man left in the English-writing world who can be called a major poet, but unhappily he has fallen on lean years; for more than a decade his verse has lacked verve. In About the House, no sudden reanimation of the muse is evident; yet in these pages the poet attempts to draft a new lease on creative life. Auden in his previous poetry has systematically sublimated private feeling into public statement; in this volume, with wavering will and sometimes with quavering hand, he ventures to describe the private person who hides behind...
...this sensitive evocation of adolescence, which its author considers her best verse, Phyllis McGinley's daughter Julie was the model. The McGinley muse, albeit a distant traveler, alights most often on the ordinary landscapes of motherhood and domesticity-the only two professions that consistently outrank the poet. Since the 1930s, Housewife Hayden has been singing the substantial pleasures of the hearth, and contentedly reminding herself...
Even so, it was on campus that the giddy prom trotter's brainy side began to show. For as far back as she could remember, the muse had been coaxing her thoughts toward verse, most of it not much better than her first quatrain, composed...
...summoned her to the office, brandished a copy of The New Yorker with a McGinley poem in it, and confided the hope that this moonlighting would not interfere with her classroom commitments. At the end of the year, the schoolteacher decided not to let classroom commitments hobble her muse. She resigned...
Until Phyllis McGinley, no poet had ever successfully domesticated the muse, or, for that matter, had even tried to. Her singular achievement is that she has brought off the match without undue strain on either partner. The Hayden household in Larchmont rang to the rhythms of recited poetry. "We used to sit around the fire while she read it to us," Daughter Julie recalls. "It was mostly ballads-and Yeats and Chesterton too. She chose dramatic stuff because she believes that poetry should appeal to the emotions. Mother and Patsy would always cry at the sad parts...