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“... a waste of shame’. These must all be among the (at least) ‘49 outstanding poems’ which W.H. Auden finds among the Sonnets in his helpful introduction to the Signet edition. And it must be this kind of central, classic writing that made C.S. Lewis, in his Oxford history of non-dramatic 16th-century literature, speak of the Sonnets as not just the ...”

“... be praised in language less external. For van Doren, then, the Odes. Anthologising Dryden, W.H. Auden remarked appreciatively that left to himself he would have filled his whole book with Prologues and Epilogues. Or again, Keith Walker, in his Oxford Poetry Library selection, confines himself almost entirely (after Mac Flecknoe, parts of Absalom and ...”

“... music. There was quite a good bookshop, with English books, and a hotel, justly described by W.H. Auden in the book he and Louis MacNeice wrote about Iceland as not the kind of thing you like if you like that kind of thing. The only drink was sherry, imported from Spain under some mutual trade agreement and exempted from the general prohibition of liquor. The ...”

“... them was not unconditional, it was also not unintelligent. She was much affected by something W.H. Auden had written – ‘To be wellbred means to have respect for the solitude of others, whether they be mere acquaintances or, and this is much more difficult, persons we love’ – and felt it applied to her relationship with Susan. ‘I do not see how I can ...”

“... surprises within oneself the church-going urge to be more serious. Alan Bennett’s piece on W.H. Auden, which seemed so good when it appeared in the paper, seems better still reprinted. For this, the justly famous Bennett can have got no royalties, no curtain calls, no green-rooms cries of ‘Darling!’ His reward was the special, monkish sense of release ...”

“... Brierley, Leslie Halward and John Hampson, and poets with a background in the city, such as W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, avoided living there if they could. In public, Neville Chamberlain would praise the city for which he was an MP and with which his family was so closely identified; privately, he sneered that ‘all the people of cultivation go to ...”

“... following year Klaus, too, was declared stateless. In 1935, five days after her marriage to W.H. Auden, her second husband, Erika was also stripped of her citizenship. (Auden seemed to get infinite amusement from his relationship with the Manns. ‘What else are buggers for?’ he replied when asked why he had married the ...”

“... biographical sources for the power and originality of the poetry they found so mesmerising: W.H. Auden believed that Eliot had had a mystical vision when he was a young child, Hart Crane was convinced that he was secretly gay, while Delmore Schwartz was a fount of scurrilous stories about Eliot’s sex life, which, according to Schwartz, included a ...”

“... route from Nazi Europe. Inspired by the example of Erika Mann, who had recently married W.H. Auden, Maria approached the window cleaner of the Huxleys’ London pied à terre in Albany: ‘He was a British subject. She didn’t actually know from where, the West Indies probably, possibly from Africa … Aldous wasn’t quite certain he would do.’ The ...”

“... and American artists who gathered at her Sunday afternoon salon. Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, Sergei Eisenstein, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht ...”

“... poetry illustrating various of its themes (beginning and ending with the verses by Homer and W.H. Auden that give the book its title). The section entitled ‘The Historic Consequences of the Long War’ starts with Philip Larkin’s Imperial lament, ‘Homage to a Government’, whose last line is a kind of inversion of the much better known coda to ‘An ...”

“... it in English, though, lest the very asking be rather affected.Come off it, or un peu trop fort: Auden, for instance, is asked not to come on quite so strong. When Auden contrasts poets (‘They can dash forward like hussars’) with novelists (who ‘must / Become the whole of boredom’), it remains for Larkin to do the ...”

“... kind Marinetti and the Futurists had in mind. Neither does it have the fine-tuned punchiness of Auden’s ‘Night Mail’, a masterclass in how to make reliability both comforting and somehow gripping. One of the reasons for the dynamism of the Auden poem is the driving verbs that power the lines along; Cunard’s poem ...”

“... and Easter-Day, probably written under persuasion from his wife, managed to teach W.H. Auden the sparkling metric of his New Year Letter (sometimes wrongly described as ‘Augustan octosyllabics’); and the over-long, over-dense rather boring Fifine at the Fair, one of the late narrative poems, in some extraordinary way strikes notes that make it ...”

“... you and I can get together any time.’ After meeting Madame Chiang and her husband when he and Auden were visiting China to report on the war with Japan, Christopher Isherwood wrote that she can become at will the cultivated, Westernised woman with a knowledge of literature and art; the technical expert, discussing aeroplane engines and machine-guns; the ...”