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The Portable Victorian and Edwardian Poets, Tennyson to Yeats
Book by Auden, W. H., Pearson, Norman Holmes
- GenresPoetry
630 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1950
1 person is currently reading
37 people want to read
About the author
W.H. Auden
617 books1,063 followersPoems, published in such collections as
Look, Stranger!
(1936) and
The Shield of Achilles
(1955), established importance of British-American writer and critic Wystan Hugh Auden in 20th-century literature.
In and near Birmingham, he developed in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent schools and studied at Christ church, Oxford. From 1927, Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship despite briefer but more intense relations with other men. Auden passed a few months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.
He then spent five years from 1930 to 1935, teaching in English schools and then traveled to Iceland and China for books about his journeys. People noted stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide attention at the age of 23 years in 1930 with his first book, Poems ; The Orators followed in 1932.
Three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 to 1938 built his reputation in a left-wing politics.
People best know this Anglo for love such as "Funeral Blues," for political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939," for culture and psychology, such as The Age of Anxiety , and for religion, such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." In 1939, partly to escape a liberal reputation, Auden moved to the United States. Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship to 1939. In 1939, Auden fell in lust with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage.
From 1941, Auden taught in universities. This relationship ended in 1941, when Chester Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship.
Auden taught in universities through 1945. His work, including the long For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror , in the 1940s focused on religious themes. He attained citizenship in 1946.
The title of his long The Age of Anxiety , a popular phrase, described the modern era; it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. From 1947, he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia. From 1947, Auden and Chester Kallman lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation and often collaborated on opera libretti, such as The Rake's Progress for music of Igor Stravinsky until death of Auden.
Occasional visiting professorships followed in the 1950s. From 1956, he served as professor at Oxford. He wintered in New York and summered in Ischia through 1957. From 1958, he wintered usually in New York and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.
He served as professor at Oxford to 1961; his popular lectures with students and faculty served as the basis of his prose The Dyer's Hand in 1962.
Auden, a prolific prose essayist, reviewed political, psychological and religious subjects, and worked at various times on documentary films, plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his controversial and influential career, views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as claim of Joseph Brodsky of his "greatest mind of the twentieth century."
He wintered in Oxford in 1972/1973 and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, until the end of his life.
After his death, films, broadcasts, and popular media enabled people to know and ton note much more widely "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," t
In and near Birmingham, he developed in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent schools and studied at Christ church, Oxford. From 1927, Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship despite briefer but more intense relations with other men. Auden passed a few months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.
He then spent five years from 1930 to 1935, teaching in English schools and then traveled to Iceland and China for books about his journeys. People noted stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide attention at the age of 23 years in 1930 with his first book, Poems ; The Orators followed in 1932.
Three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 to 1938 built his reputation in a left-wing politics.
People best know this Anglo for love such as "Funeral Blues," for political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939," for culture and psychology, such as The Age of Anxiety , and for religion, such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." In 1939, partly to escape a liberal reputation, Auden moved to the United States. Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship to 1939. In 1939, Auden fell in lust with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage.
From 1941, Auden taught in universities. This relationship ended in 1941, when Chester Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship.
Auden taught in universities through 1945. His work, including the long For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror , in the 1940s focused on religious themes. He attained citizenship in 1946.
The title of his long The Age of Anxiety , a popular phrase, described the modern era; it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. From 1947, he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia. From 1947, Auden and Chester Kallman lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation and often collaborated on opera libretti, such as The Rake's Progress for music of Igor Stravinsky until death of Auden.
Occasional visiting professorships followed in the 1950s. From 1956, he served as professor at Oxford. He wintered in New York and summered in Ischia through 1957. From 1958, he wintered usually in New York and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.
He served as professor at Oxford to 1961; his popular lectures with students and faculty served as the basis of his prose The Dyer's Hand in 1962.
Auden, a prolific prose essayist, reviewed political, psychological and religious subjects, and worked at various times on documentary films, plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his controversial and influential career, views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as claim of Joseph Brodsky of his "greatest mind of the twentieth century."
He wintered in Oxford in 1972/1973 and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, until the end of his life.
After his death, films, broadcasts, and popular media enabled people to know and ton note much more widely "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," t
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 13, 2016
I don't know if I'll ever "finish" this book, but I decided to re-read a bunch of the earlier British and American poets anthologized in here--not Whitman or Dickinson or Hopkins all of whom are great and who I read anyway. And a strange thing happened: I found out that most of these poets who commanded such huge audiences in their time, and such prestige, aren't all that readable today. Emily Bronte--nope. Fitzgerald--please. Edward Lear is still fun. Longfellow was surprisingly readable. His "Snow flakes" is perfectly Imagist. Oliver Wendell Holmes--not bad. James Russell Lowell --light but maybe. But Robert Browning who I always admired is far too long winded. Borges in his book A Course on English Literature (1966) which I am reading alongside this book, says he should have written in prose. Aside from "My Last Duchess" I agree. Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" also holds up, and "Rugby Chapel." The big surprise is how fabulous Tennyson remains. He was targeted by the moderns like Pound and Eliot and soundly trounced by subsequent poets, and Borges doesn't even write about him. But I read all 64 pages of Auden's selections and then re-read them, and went on to another small volume I have of his shorter poems. The longer ones selected here gave me a taste for his narrative poems too. I may try those. He wrote for sixty years and so there are lower spots, but his ear and his command of the language is more perfect even than Shakespeare's. It seems as though he could make music out of any combination of words. His ideas aren't great, but he's never pretentious. His narratives are entertaining--you want to know what happens next. And some of the parts of In Memoriam A.H.H. are simply delicious after all these years. Who would have guessed it?
June 21, 2012
A superb collection, with masterful selections by the editors (I would expect nothing less from a work compiled in part by W. H. Auden). The problem that I have with Norton Anthologies of Poetry is that they're just too large and wearying; I consider them reference books, to be used when necessary. On the other hand, a book like this is compulsively readable, and the fact that it focuses on a period of only forty-four years worth of English language poetry means that it can exhaustively cover the best that was written in those years. With so many brilliant entries (Whitman's unsurpassed When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, Tennyson's elegiac verses, Christina Rosetti's hymns, Browning's dramatic monologues, Edward Lear's nonsense, Swinburne's masochistic lines, Emily Dickinson's compact masterworks, the entirety of Lewis Carroll's sublime The Hunting of the Snark) this is a collection well-worth owning and returning to often.
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December 23, 2011
This was a slog for me, literally took years to get through. I don't 'get' poetry so this was me not the content.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews