Word: poetically
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...steps of the Crystal Palace on his wooden leg, supporting himself on his famous umbrella, and clasping a huge red handkerchief in the other hand." The wooden leg has replaced the clubfoot of Byron's dashing early years, which the poet-King lost, along with all vestiges of poetic vision, while fighting ineptly against the Turks near Lepanto...
Auden assimilated Marx and Freud, yet eventually became the kind of arch-poetic witness to a disarming, irony proof piety that a secular age requires. The fact that a cursory reader may feel he has been here before is not a problem. It is the whole point. Before abandoning his verses to history, Auden liked to be sure that, whatever their message, each one sounded as if it could only have been written by W.H. Auden. Everything in Thank You, Fog qualifies. As with saved letters from lost sons or fathers, so with the last words of this dead poet...
...occasional forays into literature are also, occasionally, rewarding--his discussion of asymmetry and ambiguity, for example. But here, too, linguistic analogies often lead him astray. There is something crudely reductionist about his view of poetry as prose dressed up by poetic transformations, and his claim that the sound structure ("phonology") of poetry works against structure and meaning ("syntax" and "semantics") ignores the work of linguists and literary critics alike...
...celebrated dancing and fighting is reduced to a series of galvanic gestures and deafening groans. The groans may be distinguished from the songs easily: the songs have words. Those lyrics, which act upon the mind like nepenthe, are also by Segal, a classics scholar who is driving without a poetic license. The music proves again that Composer Mitch Leigh (Man of La Mancha) is a man of parts-part Leonard Bernstein, part Tchaikovsky, part '40s movie scores...
Dagger Thrust. Each age must measure its knowledge of war, its concept of force against the Iliad, and that is one reason the poem has been translated and retranslated, from Alexander Pope's resounding version in 1720 to Richmond Lattimore's literal yet poetic rendering of 1951. In Pope, for instance, dactylic hexameters were given their royally cadenced English equivalent to which Homeric heroes stepped rather like late-Renaissance princes. Robert Fitzgerald, Harvard's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and a poet (Spring Shade, 1971) in his own right, has cut back on the pomp without...