Saturday, February 24, 2007

More on Auden

From The New York Sun via 3quarksdaily:
"By 1939, Auden had grown tired of being the most contemporary of poets, an antenna for his generation. "
May be this is the appeal of artists like Auden and Bob Dylan (Even John Howard used to like Bob Dylan). Continued:
"Rather, Auden's breaking of his own style now looks like one of the key moral gestures of 20th-century English literature. Auden was one of the first great writers to recognize that, after World War II, the modernist vision — with its abstractions and myths, its glamorizing of danger and sacrifice — was no longer sustainable. Poetry, to be credible in a new world, had to be ethical in a new way: scrupulous about its claims, its concepts, even its language."

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