Word: never
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...were silly like us," Auden wrote of Irish Poet William Butler Yeats, but the truth is that Yeats was sillier, more willing to appear foolish and embrace mumbo jumbo in service to his art. Auden's way was very different, circumspect; his poetry achieved greatness but never reached out for Yeatsian grandeur. He wrote...
...part of a series commemorating the quatercentenary of the birth of Cervantes is still talked of, for he had consumed a few too many Martinis before lecturing, began by apologizing for his new set of dentures, and then launched upon Don Quixote by admitting that he'd never managed to read that novel through to the end, and doubting whether anyone in his audience had. When the noise of ruffling academic feathers had subsided, some years later Harvard offered Auden an impressive - sum for a series of lectures...
...novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience." Singer is not referring to the warmth of the family or the affection of the blessed for those less fortunate. He is talking about sex. Well he might. At 75, the author shows no diminution of passion or of his celebrated capacity for fusing the erotic with the grotesque...
Singer has never had greater command of his material. At times he is the Jewish Somerset Maugham, spinning yarns of jealousy and violence with the detached tone of a narrator who just happened to be on the scene when the gun went off. At other instances he is a Kafkaesque master of the parable. At still others he is as comic and trenchant as Saul Bellow: a pretentious artist declares, "I must create. This is a physical need with me." A writer who consents to meet with a wealthy vulgarian is enticed with promises: "In the other world, a huge...
...from reviewers, but his reputation now would not be much different, and his estate would have been far smaller. He wrote one superb and unimprovable book, Apley, several good ones (So Little Time, Point of No Return) and quite a few that were glib, unimportant, and exceedingly popular. He never had to teach freshman English or write book reviews, and he lived where he pleased. When he was middle-aged and famous, the Book-of-the-Month Club appointed him to its panel of judges, and that seems to have been exactly where he belonged...