Download or read book What W H Auden Can Do for You written by Alexander McCall Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-29 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling novelist Alexander McCall Smith's charming account of how the poet W. H. Auden has helped guide his life—and how he might guide yours too When facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie—Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and title character of a series of novels by best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith—often refers to the great twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden. This is no accident: McCall Smith has long been fascinated by Auden. Indeed, the novelist, best known for his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, calls the poet not only the greatest literary discovery of his life but also the best of guides on how to live. In this book, McCall Smith has written a charming personal account about what Auden has done for him—and what he just might do for you. Part self-portrait, part literary appreciation, the book tells how McCall Smith first came across the poet's work in the 1970s, while teaching law in Belfast, a violently divided city where Auden's "September 1, 1939," a poem about the outbreak of World War II, strongly resonated. McCall Smith goes on to reveal how his life has related to and been inspired by other Auden poems ever since. For example, he describes how he has found an invaluable reflection on life's transience in "As I Walked Out One Evening," while "The More Loving One" has provided an instructive meditation on unrequited love. McCall Smith shows how Auden can speak to us throughout life, suggesting how, despite difficulties and change, we can celebrate understanding, acceptance, and love for others. An enchanting story about how art can help us live, this book will appeal to McCall Smith's fans and anyone curious about Auden.

Download or read book The Girls at the Kingfisher Club written by Genevieve Valentine and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reimagining of the "Twelve Dancing Princesses" traces the story of a family of flappers who work in a 1920s speakeasy until their suspicious father decides to marry them off, prompting a confrontation with a bootlegger from the eldest sister's past.

Download or read book Reading Auden written by John R. Boly and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Auden is the first book to consider the poetry of W. H. Auden from the perspective of his own theory of the text, rather than that of the romantic norms he deliberately rejected. According to John R. Boly, Auden departs from the romantics in approaching the poem not as a means of expressing an emotion or conveying an idea but as a game whose goal is the continuous transformation of its own rules of play.

Download or read book Randall Jarrell on W H Auden written by Randall Jarrell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Delivered at Princeton University in 1951 and 1952, Jarrell's lectures reflect a passionate appreciation of Auden's work, a witty attack from an informed opponent, and an important document of a major poet's reception."--Jacket.

Download or read book W H Auden s Poetry written by R. Victoria Arana and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. H. Auden is perhaps the most important English language poet of the 20th century. He produced marvelous poems-even in his last days.However, critics and reviewers not only have not recognized the aesthetics of the poetry Auden wrote after 1965, but they have ignored or made prejudiced and disparaging remarks about it, thus diverting subsequent critical (and popular) attention from its remarkable virtues. The aim of W. H. Auden's Poetry: Mythos, Theory, and Practice is to clarify Auden's career-long interest in poetic theory and, above all, to show how his changing thoughts about poetry impelled him towards the production of the last three volumes of his verse.Because it links the poet's biographia literaria and his aesthetic vision, this book will appeal to poets as well as to students of writing-particularly those interested in the creative process and its correlation to artistic forms. Students of 20th-century American and British literature will find in these pages a comprehensive survey of Auden's thoughts about his art and the poetry of his predecessors as well as of his contemporaries. Teachers of Auden's works will appreciate the strong light such a survey casts on Auden's poetic practice. Engineers and architects, physicists and biologists, cultural critics, social scientists, philosophers, and especially Gestalt psychologists might well enjoy reading about the ways their fields have intersected and influenced the thinking of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and courageous poets.

Download or read book W H Auden written by Peter Edgerly Firchow and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is not a "survey" or a guide to all or even most of Auden's poetry, though it does follow the general outlines of Auden's development as a poet and thinker."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Landscapes of W H Auden s Interwar Poetry written by Ladislav Vít and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study foregrounding Auden’s sense of place as a means for enhancing our grasp of this crucial twentieth-century poet. Proposing that Auden had a remarkable spatial sensibility, this book concentrates on his treatment of his homeland England, as well as the North Pennines and Iceland, both of which served as his ‘good’ places, ‘holy’ grounds and sources of topophilic sentiment. The readings draw on the scholarship of humanistic geography, tracing patterns of mental constructs which emerge from spatial experience. In a scholarly but engaging way, this book argues that focusing on Auden’s poetics of place as it emerged and evolved can be instrumental to our understanding of this influential poet not only in relation to his epoch but also to the Anglophone poetic tradition. Precisely because of his stature, these elaborations on Auden’s preoccupation with places, escapism, borders and local identity promise to enrich our understanding of the cultural and intellectual climate of the interwar period, when established notions of local places and cultures were beginning to be contested by internationalisation. This study will be of interest to both academics and students in the field of Anglophone literary studies while also appealing to those attracted to Auden’s poetry, interwar culture and the literary representation of space.

Download or read book W H Auden Encyclopedia written by David Garrett Izzo and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011-02-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W.H. Auden’s life and work were perhaps best explained and condensed in the words of Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor, when he remarked, “[Auden] grew up in a household in which the scientific inquiries of his father maintained an uneasy truce with the ritualized religion of his mother.” Indeed, science and religion were dominant themes in Auden’s life and work, which for him were oftentimes one and the same. Auden was hailed as the new T.S. Eliot and as the “coming” man, greatly influencing the future generations of angry young men with his thoughts on science, religion, and the relationship between the two. This book is an exhaustive reference to W.H. Auden. Those new to Auden and his writing will find the work a comprehensive introduction, while Auden scholars will appreciate the quick access it offers to the details of all his poems, plays, libretti, and other pieces of writing. It also includes entries on the people who were closest and most important to Auden, including fellow writers Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Edward Upward, and T.S. Eliot, as well as significant events in his life, such as his arrival in America, his vision of agape, and his search in science and religion for answers to the deep questions of life and existence.

Download or read book Auden s Syllabic Verse written by Richard Hillyer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the poetry written by W. H. Auden between 1939 and the time of his death consists of syllabic verse, or lines arranged in accordance with a predetermined syllable-count but no fixed number or distribution of stresses. This book presents a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of his many and widely varied syllabics, grouping them primarily by the formal sub-categories to which they belong (as measured by line-length, stanza-type, or some other aspect of their overall design). With this approach the book clarifies the dynamic range and technical inventiveness of Auden’s syllabics. It also shows how his work of compares with that of Robert Bridges and Marianne Moore, two pioneers in the writing of English syllabic whose verse he was familiar with.

Download or read book W H Auden written by Humphrey Carpenter and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. H. Auden disapproved of literary biography. Or did he? The truth is far more equivocal than at first seems apparent. There is no denying he delivered himself of such unambiguous pronouncements as 'Biographies of writers are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.'; and that he asked for his friends to burn his letters at his death, but, against that, Auden himself often reviewed literary biographies and normally with enthusiasm. Moreover he argued for biographies of writers such as Dryden, Trollope, Wagner and Gerard Manley Hopkins as their lives would tell us something about their art. Humphrey Carpenter himself nicely summarizes Auden's ambiguity on this question. 'Here (referring to literary biography), as so often in his life, Auden adopted a dogmatic attitude which did not reflect the full range of his opinions, and which he sometimes flatly contradicted.' Although the biography was not authorized it did receive the co-operation of the Auden Estate which gave permission for letters and unpublished works to be quoted. The result is a biography that was widely praised on first publication in 1981 and which continues to hold its own. Now is the obvious time to reissue it with the character of Humphrey Carpenter playing an important role in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art. In his introduction Alan Bennett writes 'When I started writing the play I made much use of the biographies of both Auden and Britten written by Humphrey Carpenter and both are models of their kind. Indeed I was consulting his books so much that eventually Carpenter found his way into the play.' 'Carpenter is a model biographer - diligent, unspeculative, sympathetic, and extremely good at finding out what happened when and with whom . . . admirably detailed and researched study.' John Bayley, The Listener 'an illuminating book; full of information, unobtrusively affectionate, it describes with unpretentious elegance the curve of a great poet's life and work' Frank Kermode, Guardian 'sharpens and usually lights up even the most canvassed parts of the Auden life and myth . . . a deeply interesting book about a deeply interesting life' Roy Fuller, Sunday Times ' . . . the story of a remarkable man told by one of the best living biographers' David Cecil, Book Choice

Download or read book Poetic Art of W H Auden written by John G. Blair and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Attempts to isolate and describe the characteristic poetic mode in which Auden has worked for more than thirty years. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Auden s Apologies for Poetry written by Lucy McDiarmid and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Common wisdom has it that when Auden left England for New York in January 1939, he had already written his best poems. He left behind (most critics believe) all the idealisms of the 1930s and all serious concerns to become an unserious poet, a writer of ingenious, agreeable, minor lyrics. Lucy McDiarmid argues that such readers, spoiled by the simple intensities of apocalypse, distort and misjudge Auden's greatest work. She shows that once Auden was freed from the obligation to criticize and reform the society of his native country, he devoted his imaginative energies to commentary on art. And about art he was never complaisant: with greater passion than he had ever used to undermine "bourgeois" society, Auden undermined literature. Every major poem and every essay became a retractio, a statement of art's frivolity, vanity, and guilt. Auden's Apologies for Poetry, then, sets forth the unorthodox notion that the chief subject of later, "New Yorker" Auden is the insignificance of poetry. Commenting on all the major poems and essays from the 1930s through the 1960s, and analyzing manuscript revisions and unpublished works, it charts the changes in Auden's poetics in the light of his shift from an oral to a written model of poetry. In his earliest work Auden voices the tentative hope that poems can be like loving spoken words, transforming and redeeming, themselves carriers of value. After 1939 he takes for granted a written model. His later essays and poems deny art spiritual value, claiming that "love, or truth in any serious sense" is a "reticence," the unarticulated worth that exists--if at all--outside the words on the page. Later Auden creates a poetics of apology and self-deprecation, a radical undermining of poetry itself. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Auden s Games of Knowledge written by Richard R. Bozorth and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length consideration of Auden as a homosexual poet, this volume shows that Auden's career was tied to a process of gay self-interrogation unparalleled in modern poetry and argues that he was driven by a powerful yearning to comprehend the psychological, political, and ethical implications of same-sex desire. Auden's theories about poetry in the 1930s and after reflected an intense concern with how to write publicly as a homosexual poet. That struggle was made manifest in his love poetry, which Bozorth argues constitutes a kind of "erotic autobiography" exploring the distinct challenges of homosexual love. Bozorth's approach is manifold, examining the poet's engagements with avant-garde poetics, gay subculture, psychoanalysis, leftist politics, and theology. This book proposes that from his early fascination with secret agent and trickster figures to his later theories of poetry as an I-Thou relation, Auden viewed poetry as a fictional but primal erotic encounter with the reader.

Download or read book W H Auden written by Dr John Haffenden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

Download or read book The Etymological Poetry of W H Auden J H Prynne and Paul Muldoon written by Mia Gaudern and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book defines, analyses, and theorises a late modern 'etymological poetry' that is alive to the past lives of its words, and probes the possible significance of them both explicitly and implicitly. Close readings of poetry and criticism by Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon investigate the implications of their etymological perspectives for the way their language establishes relationships between people, and between people and the world. These twin functions of communication and representation are shown to be central to the critical reception of etymological poetry, which is a category of 'difficult' poetry. However resonant poetic etymologising may be, critics warn that it shows the poet's natural interest in language degenerating into an unhealthy obsession with the dictionary. It is unavoidably pedantic, in the post-Saussurean era, to entertain the idea that a word's history might have any relevance to its current use. As such, etymological poetry elicits the closest of close readings, thus encouraging readers to reflect not only on its own pedantry, obscurity, and virtuosity, but also on how these qualities function in criticism. As well as presenting a new way of reading three very different late modern poet-critics, this book addresses an understudied aspect of the relationship between poetry and criticism. Its findings are situated in the context of literary debates about difficulty and diction, and in larger cultural conversations about the workings of language as a historical event.

Download or read book The Complete Works of W H Auden written by W. H. Auden and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains Auden and Christopher Isherwood's dramatic extravaganzas The Dog Beneath the Skin, the Ascent of F 6, and On the Frontier. It also includes the two versions of Paid on Both Sides--which are so different as to constitute two works--and Auden's satiric revue The Dance of Death. Two plays appear in print for the first time, Auden and Isherwood's The Enemies of a Bishop and Auden's The Chase. Also included are Auden's prose and verse written for doucmentary films, a cabaret sketch, and an unpublished radio script. Many of the texts include poems by the young Auden that have never been published before. The extensive historical and textual notes trace the complex history of the production and revision of these plays, including full texts and rewritten scenes. During the years when these works were created, Auden moved from a "poetry of isolation" to more expansive and public writing. After he left Oxford at age twenty-one, during the summer of 1928, he wrote the tragicomic charade Paid on Both Sides. During the next ten years, until he left England for America, he created the increasingly ambitious works for stage, film, and broadcast that appear in this volume. The most important of these plays were written in collaboration with Isherwood. As the world political situation worsened, Isherwood and Auden's style combined the energy of popular entertainment with the urgency of sacramental ritual. Edard Mendelson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of Early Auden (Viking). He is the editor of two volumes of Aduen's poetry, Collected Poems (Random House) and The English Auden (Random House). Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to W H Auden written by Stan Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together specially commissioned essays by some of the world's leading experts on the life and work of W. H. Auden, one of the major English-speaking poets of the twentieth century. The volume's contributors include a prize-winning poet, Auden's literary executor and editor, and his most recent, widely acclaimed biographer. It offers fresh perspectives on his work from Auden critics, alongside specialists from such diverse fields as drama, ecological and travel studies. It provides scholars, students and general readers with a comprehensive and authoritative account of Auden's life and works in clear and accessible English. Besides providing authoritative accounts of the key moments and dominant themes of his poetic development, the Companion examines his language, style and formal innovation, his prose and critical writing and his ideas about sexuality, religion, psychoanalysis, politics, landscape, ecology, and globalisation. It also contains a comprehensive bibliography of writings about Auden.