dave:
> 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.
Pope did that too ...
> 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).
Even that's fuzzed. Some of his best poems -- "September 1939" and the
Yeats elegy, for instance -- come out of the first few years he was in the
States. Before language-shock and cultural-transition and falling into
Chester Kallman's bed fucked his head.
And then there's the revisions ...
> 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,
Auden and Cavafy, for me, are polar opposites. Cavafy had absolute artistic
integrity.
The closest comparison to Auden here is mibee Foster -- they were both male
gay middle-class English writers in the early 20thC. I can understand and
forgive Auden for being coy over his sexuality -- sheesh, they'd have
slammed him in jail if he'd let his mouth walk. But then there's "The
Platonic Blow". Like Foster's unpublished gay prose ... Deeply
compromised.
Has anyone ever written about the artistic dynamic of being a closet gay in
English writing? Other examples might be Edward Lear and Clough.
> 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.
All vicars of Bray sing from the same songsheet.
Cheers,
Robin
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