Word: poem
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...beyond promise, beyond middle-age slump, beyond fashion, the clever schoolboy deserves to be read for what he is: an endlessly experimenting, self-revising poet whose true voice is to try all voices, an honestly fluctuating responder to a fluctuating age. City Without Walls, containing poems of the past five years, includes nothing to rank with Auden's best. He appears to be long past the writing of wry love poems like "Lullaby." Perhaps more important, nowhere in this collection does he achieve the delicately blended wit and civilized humanity of "In Praise of Limestone," which...
...always, there is Auden modestly on the stump, or in the pulpit, but steadily aware of the dangers of pontificating. In the title poem, he invokes his Age of Anxiety themes, then introduces a second voice to cut himself down: "What fun and games you find it to play/ Jere-miah-cum-Juvenal . . ." Suddenly yet a third voice yawns: "Go to sleep now for God's sake!/ You both will feel better by breakfast time...
These qualities of mind and art are never better summed up than in the book's final poem, "Prologue at Sixty." Now beginning to listen to thoughts of his own death "like the distant roll/ of thunder at a picnic," the poet remains stubbornly tentative to the end. Part prayer, part history lesson, "Sixty" links Auden in his Austrian retreat to the Northern barbarian races-with whom Auden has always been conscious of kinship-and the long sweep of European history. "Turks have been here, Boney's legions,/ Germans, Russians, and no joy they brought." The medium through...
...poem is casual...
...rival Zeitung fights back with such circulation builders as sex crossword puzzles, a dirty-poem page and .lurid sexoscopes (in January, Leos are "in for some luck: the boss's wife is after you," but Scorpios are advised to relax and "use this time to regenerate yourself and gather new strength"). Like concerned, civic-minded papers everywhere, the St. Pauli sheets are not above crusading. One recent Nachrichten headline read: HOW PROSTITUTION IS BEING RUINED BY HOME...