Love, Death and Music: The Poetry of W.H. Auden

https://www.wsj.com/articles/love-death-and-music-review-the-poetry-of-w-h-auden-11660317959

by apollinaire • 4 years ago

32 4 4 years ago

wsj.com

hprotagonist• 4 years ago

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

jgbmlg• 4 years ago

“All we are not stares back at what we are.”

neonate• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/WUXuz

svat• 4 years ago

No other English poet wrote successfully in so many structural forms, or summoned so many of the language’s ancestral voices […] claiming as personal playground the entirety of English versification.

An interesting example, not mentioned in the article, is Auden's "verse commentary" in Night Mail, a documentary by the General Post Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmciuKsBOi0 (full film: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7utm3o)

Auden wrote his lines "timing the spoken verse with a stopwatch in order to fit it exactly to the shot". Wikipedia says the director Watt had only grudgingly agreed to the idea in the first place, but came around:

Watt cared little for Auden's fame and well known work, calling him "a half-witted Swedish deckhand" and complained of his frequent lateness during filming. Watt later wrote: "[Auden] was to prove how wrong my estimation of him was, and leave me with a lifetime's awe of his talent".

Love, Death and Music: The Poetry of W.H. Auden

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