Cor, yet again! I've been wading through all the recent threads with a
growing sense of bewilderment as I don't understand what the foci of
contention are. With Auden, and obscurity, one thing the learned Dr Hamilton
omitted to mention was WHA's habit in early years of combining the best
lines from different poems and hanging them together on a loose thread. Gay
argot, the twistings of public attitude WHA adopted throughout his career
( a big question to ask of his writing is the dramatic, so to speak,
transition, from pseudo-Marxist to pseudo-Anglican after his move to the
US). When I think of Auden I have several points of artistic comparison: one
is Cavafy, a gay poet who could write with real integrity about his
feelings, another is Benjamin Britten, who presents problems, in a different
medium, similar to Auden, and a third is Dryden, that technically brilliant,
arch-opportunist and turncoat of the seventeenth century.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
|