dave:
> I think there are elements of misdirection in Auden's gay poems (though
I'm
> told 'In Praise of Limestone' has all sorts of 'code' in it)
Hey, it's not (just) code in 'In Praise of Limestone', it's The Amazing
Vanishing Dildo!!!
> one too could
> also say the same about his Anglicanism which possibly deserves the award
> for the phoniest posture in twentieth century English poetry.
Geoffrey Hill, anyone?
> I agree that
> Auden's work is compromised by a lack of 'authenticity', an exception is
the
> elegy on Louis Macneice, there he means what he's saying.
I realise I have multiple problems on this. Thinking back, I was a bit
screwed up when Macneice died. (The Five Year Rule?) I was listening to
_Persons From Porlock_ on the Home Service (oh, well, I suppose it was Radio
Four by then) while they were burying LM, and it was ... odd ... Posthumous
mea culpa on How I Wasted My Life With The BBC. Letters from the Dead ...
So I wasn't in the absolutely best mood to read "Cave of Making" in The
Listener. Add to which, other than "The Shield of Achilles", post forties
Auden leaves me pretty cold.
> Technically he is
> brilliant, but there is the constant sense of 'fabrication'. I think the
> French have a word for what I mean but sadly my French is as rusty as a
> derelict bucket.
Pere Ubu prolly threw some ordure in a trebuchet at this. Ask Arni.
> Cavafy's openly homosexual poems have never raised problems for me, I
> respond to the integrity of their passion, forlorn heterosexual though I
may
> be.
I had real problems with ALL Cavafy's poems, till this time in York. It was
still The Time of the Colonels in Greece, and my PhD supervisor, Dinos
Patrides, had refused to set foot on his motherloam until they ousted them
... And they had this guy from the BBC World Service who turned up to read
Cavafy in Greek ... Blew my skull open.
Ho, boy ...
I'll see if I can scan a couple from the latest translation, for the list.
Mind you, I still don't go a bundle on the love poems -- think Cavafy was
better at history than the now, but that may be me.
Robin
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