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Orators an English Study
When The Orators was originally published in 1932 it was described by Poetry Review as 'something as important as the appearance of Mr Eliot's poems fifteen years ago'. A long poem written in both prose and verse, it was a powerful addition to the canon of modernist poetry.
- GenresPoetry
116 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1932
68 people want to read
About the author
W.H. Auden
620 books1,066 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 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 23, 2017
I'm not done with this book yet. I've read it but I'm not done. I read it sitting next to the sea coming in, a cold wind stiffening my fingers, but I couldn't put it down. There are angels and a stunning sestina and there's a war and there's a lot of experimenting with form and I love it.
April 23, 2025
P. 36, "Letter to a Wound"
Now I see that all that sort of thing is juvenile and silly, merely a reaction against insecurity and shame. You as usual of course were the first to realise this, making yourself felt whenever I had been particularly rude or insincere.
Thanks to you, I have come to see a profound significance in relations I never dreamt of considering before, an old lady’s affection for a small boy, the Waterhouses and their retriever, the curious bond between Offal and Snig, the partners in the hardware shop on the front. Even the close-ups on the films no longer disgust nor amuse me. On the contrary they sometimes make me cry; knowing you has made me understand.
It’s getting late and I have to be up betimes in the morning. You are so quiet these days that I get quite nervous, remove the dressing. No I am safe, you are still there. The wireless this evening says that the frost is coming. When it does, we know what to expect, don’t we? But I am calm. I can wait. The surgeon was dead right. Nothing will ever part us. Good-night and God bless you, my dear.
Better burn this.
Now I see that all that sort of thing is juvenile and silly, merely a reaction against insecurity and shame. You as usual of course were the first to realise this, making yourself felt whenever I had been particularly rude or insincere.
Thanks to you, I have come to see a profound significance in relations I never dreamt of considering before, an old lady’s affection for a small boy, the Waterhouses and their retriever, the curious bond between Offal and Snig, the partners in the hardware shop on the front. Even the close-ups on the films no longer disgust nor amuse me. On the contrary they sometimes make me cry; knowing you has made me understand.
It’s getting late and I have to be up betimes in the morning. You are so quiet these days that I get quite nervous, remove the dressing. No I am safe, you are still there. The wireless this evening says that the frost is coming. When it does, we know what to expect, don’t we? But I am calm. I can wait. The surgeon was dead right. Nothing will ever part us. Good-night and God bless you, my dear.
Better burn this.
January 27, 2019
The Orators was Auden’s second book, published in 1932 when he was still only starting out in his career as a poet. It occupies 93 pages in Faber’s 2015 edition, and readily justifies its standing as a separate volume. However, it is excluded from the Collected Poems not because of its length, but because Auden himself was dissatisfied with it, albeit it can be found instead in “The English Auden” –which includes many poems or versions of poems omitted from the Collected Poems. The thing is that I cannot see the reasoning for its exclusion, because I am approaching this work while reading Auden’s poems in date order, it is clearly a major step in his development as a writer, and whatever its limitations it is a significant piece of work with many attractive features. It would be absurd, to my mind, to omit this work from any serious attempt to follow his development. This is surely confirmed by the fact that Samuel Hynes, in his 1976 book “The Auden Generation,” devotes at least ten pages to a detailed discussion of The Orators, and draws from it a great deal that is interesting. At the time of reading Hynes, I went potty searching for this material in the Collected Poems, confused that it was supposedly not worth including there.
The Orators is not only lengthy but also technically diverse, switching from prose – itself varied, and incorporating quite a number of extensive lists - to various poetic styles and even incorporating some diagrams to illustrate his point at one stage. Just the physical architecture of the work is thus a source of fascination and entertainment. Auden’s use of language is also skilful and at times delightful, to the point that there is sufficient justification to spend time with this work even without having any clear grasp of what it is intended to mean or convey. In all honesty, his first publication was itself both obscure and dense; this one is in reality far more accessible. There are a number of poems or prose passages that would readily stand on their own, and be a pleasure to read for their own sake.
“There are some birds in these valleys
Who flutter round the careless
With intimate appeal,
By seeming kindness trained to snaring,
They feel no falseness
Under the spell completely
They circle can serenely,
And in the tricky light
The masked hill has a purer greenness.
Their flight looks fleeter.
But fowlers, O, like foxes,
Lie ambushed in the rushes.
Along the harmless tracks
The madman keeper crawls through brushwood,
Axe under cover.
...Alas, the signal given.
Fingers on trigger tighten.
The real unlucky dove
Must smarting fall away from brightness
Its love from living.”
It is not hard to see in this volume Auden’s debt to the legacy of TS Eliot’s Wasteland or Joyce’s Ulysses, and it is not really a handicap since he works so well with his material but it is also interesting to look for his efforts to break away from that and establish a different voice, bearing in mind the extent to which Auden himself would become a similar inspiration and obstacle for a later generation of English poets, such as Ted Hughes say, although also for his own generation.
"Life is many; in the pine a beam, very still; in the salmon an arrow leaping the ladder. The belly receives; the back rejects; the eye is an experiment of the will. Jelly fish is laziest, cares very little. Tapeworm is most ashamed; he used to be free. Fish is most selfish; snake is most envious, poisoned within; bird is most nervous; he is shot for his spirit. Eagle is proudest. Bull is stupidest..."
“The man shall love the work; the woman shall receive him as the divine representative; the child shall be born as the sign of the trust; the friend shall laugh at the joke apparently obscure... The leader shall be a fear; he shall protect from panic; the people shall reverence the carved stone under the oak-tree.”
The Orators has a coherent political theme, as an exploration of the ideas which were transforming his society at this time. Hynes concentrates on the continuing legacy of the First World War, the frothing battle of ideas from Left and Right across Europe and America in a period of economic crisis, and the emerging consensus that another world war might soon be in prospect. He notes the extent to which Auden draws on the privileged social lives of England’s wealthy elite, with their shared experiences of public school, their cars, their weekends out of town and their country house parties; this certainly grates on my nerves when I read it – notably in his satirical Address for a Prize Day.
I myself thought the poems also contained references, never very overt, to the role of these public school graduates in the administration of a vast empire and the physical coercion of its people. The prominence given to the airman, in particular, brought to my mind the role played by the RAF in the suppression of revolt or resistance in far flung peasant villages across the Middle East and Africa. I admit I become cynical when European or British politics is discussed without acknowledging this wider context. Americans might also have a rude awakening if they looked more critically at their country's foreign interventions under even the most "liberal" administrations.
The political analysis is not necessarily all that successful, but it is certainly not guilty of either simplifying the nature of society’s ills nor of glorifying the potential role of any emerging leader. There is a great deal of irony to be mastered before asserting anything definite here. It would be quite insane to attempt to read this work in the light of events as they developed after its publication. It is more interesting and surely more informative to take the work as a comment on the prevailing political debate and the prevailing sense of confusion, anxiety and fear. For a poet as much as any other public figure, it is hard to take a definite position on issues that are still only emerging from the fog of current affairs, with all sorts of possible futures yet to be pruned down by the course of events. What I do suspect is that the issues discussed in this work from 1932 are topical in 2019 for reasons that are not so hard to identify.
Whatever the experts say, I found The Orators fascinating and well worth investigating. I may return to it after reading more of Auden and his generation, to see if it survives greater scrutiny. However, I don’t feel required to see it as an object out of context, rather than a comment on both Auden’s development and also perhaps on the political evolution of his generation. Analogies with the politics of 2019 might also bear more exploration.
The Orators is not only lengthy but also technically diverse, switching from prose – itself varied, and incorporating quite a number of extensive lists - to various poetic styles and even incorporating some diagrams to illustrate his point at one stage. Just the physical architecture of the work is thus a source of fascination and entertainment. Auden’s use of language is also skilful and at times delightful, to the point that there is sufficient justification to spend time with this work even without having any clear grasp of what it is intended to mean or convey. In all honesty, his first publication was itself both obscure and dense; this one is in reality far more accessible. There are a number of poems or prose passages that would readily stand on their own, and be a pleasure to read for their own sake.
“There are some birds in these valleys
Who flutter round the careless
With intimate appeal,
By seeming kindness trained to snaring,
They feel no falseness
Under the spell completely
They circle can serenely,
And in the tricky light
The masked hill has a purer greenness.
Their flight looks fleeter.
But fowlers, O, like foxes,
Lie ambushed in the rushes.
Along the harmless tracks
The madman keeper crawls through brushwood,
Axe under cover.
...Alas, the signal given.
Fingers on trigger tighten.
The real unlucky dove
Must smarting fall away from brightness
Its love from living.”
It is not hard to see in this volume Auden’s debt to the legacy of TS Eliot’s Wasteland or Joyce’s Ulysses, and it is not really a handicap since he works so well with his material but it is also interesting to look for his efforts to break away from that and establish a different voice, bearing in mind the extent to which Auden himself would become a similar inspiration and obstacle for a later generation of English poets, such as Ted Hughes say, although also for his own generation.
"Life is many; in the pine a beam, very still; in the salmon an arrow leaping the ladder. The belly receives; the back rejects; the eye is an experiment of the will. Jelly fish is laziest, cares very little. Tapeworm is most ashamed; he used to be free. Fish is most selfish; snake is most envious, poisoned within; bird is most nervous; he is shot for his spirit. Eagle is proudest. Bull is stupidest..."
“The man shall love the work; the woman shall receive him as the divine representative; the child shall be born as the sign of the trust; the friend shall laugh at the joke apparently obscure... The leader shall be a fear; he shall protect from panic; the people shall reverence the carved stone under the oak-tree.”
The Orators has a coherent political theme, as an exploration of the ideas which were transforming his society at this time. Hynes concentrates on the continuing legacy of the First World War, the frothing battle of ideas from Left and Right across Europe and America in a period of economic crisis, and the emerging consensus that another world war might soon be in prospect. He notes the extent to which Auden draws on the privileged social lives of England’s wealthy elite, with their shared experiences of public school, their cars, their weekends out of town and their country house parties; this certainly grates on my nerves when I read it – notably in his satirical Address for a Prize Day.
I myself thought the poems also contained references, never very overt, to the role of these public school graduates in the administration of a vast empire and the physical coercion of its people. The prominence given to the airman, in particular, brought to my mind the role played by the RAF in the suppression of revolt or resistance in far flung peasant villages across the Middle East and Africa. I admit I become cynical when European or British politics is discussed without acknowledging this wider context. Americans might also have a rude awakening if they looked more critically at their country's foreign interventions under even the most "liberal" administrations.
The political analysis is not necessarily all that successful, but it is certainly not guilty of either simplifying the nature of society’s ills nor of glorifying the potential role of any emerging leader. There is a great deal of irony to be mastered before asserting anything definite here. It would be quite insane to attempt to read this work in the light of events as they developed after its publication. It is more interesting and surely more informative to take the work as a comment on the prevailing political debate and the prevailing sense of confusion, anxiety and fear. For a poet as much as any other public figure, it is hard to take a definite position on issues that are still only emerging from the fog of current affairs, with all sorts of possible futures yet to be pruned down by the course of events. What I do suspect is that the issues discussed in this work from 1932 are topical in 2019 for reasons that are not so hard to identify.
Whatever the experts say, I found The Orators fascinating and well worth investigating. I may return to it after reading more of Auden and his generation, to see if it survives greater scrutiny. However, I don’t feel required to see it as an object out of context, rather than a comment on both Auden’s development and also perhaps on the political evolution of his generation. Analogies with the politics of 2019 might also bear more exploration.
February 10, 2023
I’m still trying to make myself like this guy, but seriously man, what was the deal w the section in the middle from the POV of… an Air Force base? or bomber pilots? what was that
July 28, 2024
It may be noted at the beginning that this work exhibits the triumph of ‘idea’ rather than of ‘poetry’. The first two books of this volume have chiefly astonishing prose intermingled with intermittent pieces of poetry (in Book II). It is only in the Book III that Auden returns ceremoniously to the poetic expression of his ideas in a set of six long and short odes.
Although we are enamoured with the adroit mind that exhibits its energy in the well-wrought prose and amazes us nevertheless, by its strong sense of social responsibility, we are exasperated by the concentrated obscurity of the whole performance.
Probably on account of this ambiguity, Auden himself considered the book in later years, to have been something of a failure and called it "a fair notion fatally injured". The failure is, no doubt, the failure of poetry, because compared with Poems, it gives an evidence of the prophet and the exhibitionist getting the better of the poet. Still, it remains, in spite of its inadequacies, one of the most original works of modern times.
The Orators is in five parts. It opens with a verse Prologue, delineating the fable-like history of a growing child, innocent and beautiful. and devoted to a figure that is half mother and half country. He happily leaves home as a prophet but is snubbed and disallowed as he returns. After this there follow the three major sections. The first, called "The Initiates", contains an ‘Address for a Prize Day’, an ‘Argument’, a ‘Statement’, and ‘Letter to a Wound’.
All are in prose. The section, "Journal of an Airman," is in prose, interspersed with passages in verse.
The third section. "Six Odes," contains an odd variety of poems, from at least as early as 1927, up to 1931.
The book closes with a counterpart to the Prologue, an Epilogue after the style of the ballad "The Cutty Wren," describing a second and rougher daring departure, this time, more likely to be successful.
All the prose pieces as well as some of the verses have the tone of a riddle, and as riddles they have indeed a stirring effect on the sleepy mind.
Auden may be charged with the immaturity of tone in this work, but there is certainly a maturity in the style which is self-evolved and also most befitting to his purpose. Through the typical device of diagnostic fantasies he has drawn a touching picture of a society in calamity.
Published in 1932, this poem is the most self-revealing work of Auden. It presents a complex fantasy of the various psychic diseases of the sick individuals who belong to a diseased social order.
Although we are enamoured with the adroit mind that exhibits its energy in the well-wrought prose and amazes us nevertheless, by its strong sense of social responsibility, we are exasperated by the concentrated obscurity of the whole performance.
Probably on account of this ambiguity, Auden himself considered the book in later years, to have been something of a failure and called it "a fair notion fatally injured". The failure is, no doubt, the failure of poetry, because compared with Poems, it gives an evidence of the prophet and the exhibitionist getting the better of the poet. Still, it remains, in spite of its inadequacies, one of the most original works of modern times.
The Orators is in five parts. It opens with a verse Prologue, delineating the fable-like history of a growing child, innocent and beautiful. and devoted to a figure that is half mother and half country. He happily leaves home as a prophet but is snubbed and disallowed as he returns. After this there follow the three major sections. The first, called "The Initiates", contains an ‘Address for a Prize Day’, an ‘Argument’, a ‘Statement’, and ‘Letter to a Wound’.
All are in prose. The section, "Journal of an Airman," is in prose, interspersed with passages in verse.
The third section. "Six Odes," contains an odd variety of poems, from at least as early as 1927, up to 1931.
The book closes with a counterpart to the Prologue, an Epilogue after the style of the ballad "The Cutty Wren," describing a second and rougher daring departure, this time, more likely to be successful.
All the prose pieces as well as some of the verses have the tone of a riddle, and as riddles they have indeed a stirring effect on the sleepy mind.
Auden may be charged with the immaturity of tone in this work, but there is certainly a maturity in the style which is self-evolved and also most befitting to his purpose. Through the typical device of diagnostic fantasies he has drawn a touching picture of a society in calamity.
Published in 1932, this poem is the most self-revealing work of Auden. It presents a complex fantasy of the various psychic diseases of the sick individuals who belong to a diseased social order.
Read
October 1, 2025world war one had a profound impact on the normalcy of british life, and in a very weird way that's what w.h. auden is exploring here
April 8, 2025
O turn your head this way, be faithful here. The working mouth, the flimsy flexing knee, the leap in summer in the rubber shoes, these signal in their only codes. There is no other rendezvous for you to keep before the simple night (at night elopement is potty from the private drome. The little train will halt to pick up flowers.)
[46]
April 18, 2024
Theos Ratter
by W.H.A.T.
Was I the spirit of past future thinking,
Passively resisting the enshittening of life,
Tears in my eyes, I would break off from horror,
Words in my mouth like a deer before light.
Then would come people and my people with spirit
And persons of interest demonically possessed.
Nor would I worry so much that the questions
Of living and dying haven't really been asked.
by W.H.A.T.
Was I the spirit of past future thinking,
Passively resisting the enshittening of life,
Tears in my eyes, I would break off from horror,
Words in my mouth like a deer before light.
Then would come people and my people with spirit
And persons of interest demonically possessed.
Nor would I worry so much that the questions
Of living and dying haven't really been asked.
July 21, 2025
A glimpse into an early work of Auden, who already had mastery of meter and poetic sounds. The ideas about war and its damage aren’t clear; not sure what my “takeaway” is from this book.
October 10, 2025
10/10 good in a disturbing english way
August 17, 2015
Like many of you, I developed a crush on Auden after watching the movie, "Four Weddings and a Funeral." After waiting twenty odd years, I finally decided to act on my crush. I wasn't sure where to begin and so I perused Auden's wikipedia entry and it sounded like The Orators was a very ambitious, early book of poems. I imagined that it would be inspiring to read, while still not fully mature in terms of technique. Let me first share one of my favorite poems from the book. It is Ode 3. As I read, I hear the rhythms of Auden's meter so clearly, it propels each line forward, and introduces a comic and sarcastic tone:
England our cow
Once was a lady—is she now?
Walk through her cities, walk with a pal
Through the streets between the power-house and green canal
And see what they're at—our proletariat.
O my, what peeps
At disheartened sweeps—
Fitters and moulders,
Wielders and welders,
Dyers and bakers,
And boiler-tube makers
Poofs and ponies,
All of them dunces.
Those over thirty,
Ugly and dirty,
What are they doing
Except just stewing?
But overall the book is very skippable. Even Auden agrees! In his introduction to the 1966 edition he writes: "As a rule, when I re-read something I wrote when I was younger, I can think myself back into the frame of mind in which I wrote it. The Orators, though, defeats me." Charitably, one might interpret the book as a response to TS Eliot's strategy for dealing with modernity in The Waste Land ("these fragments I have shored against my ruin") because The Orators contains so many styles of prose and poetry, war journals, stream of consciousness, sermons, odes, sestinas, etc. The real problem with this book is that the writing is not very beautiful, the ideas are not very clear. Here is a typical example of the limp and obscure writing:
"One cannot remember the day of the week. One is impotent from fear of judgment. One pays for foolishness with the loss of land. One loses his job for an error in long division."
England our cow
Once was a lady—is she now?
Walk through her cities, walk with a pal
Through the streets between the power-house and green canal
And see what they're at—our proletariat.
O my, what peeps
At disheartened sweeps—
Fitters and moulders,
Wielders and welders,
Dyers and bakers,
And boiler-tube makers
Poofs and ponies,
All of them dunces.
Those over thirty,
Ugly and dirty,
What are they doing
Except just stewing?
But overall the book is very skippable. Even Auden agrees! In his introduction to the 1966 edition he writes: "As a rule, when I re-read something I wrote when I was younger, I can think myself back into the frame of mind in which I wrote it. The Orators, though, defeats me." Charitably, one might interpret the book as a response to TS Eliot's strategy for dealing with modernity in The Waste Land ("these fragments I have shored against my ruin") because The Orators contains so many styles of prose and poetry, war journals, stream of consciousness, sermons, odes, sestinas, etc. The real problem with this book is that the writing is not very beautiful, the ideas are not very clear. Here is a typical example of the limp and obscure writing:
"One cannot remember the day of the week. One is impotent from fear of judgment. One pays for foolishness with the loss of land. One loses his job for an error in long division."
April 24, 2008
This book kicked my butt! or should I just say -- I have no idea what to think about what I just read. I even tried to get some context from online sources but sheez, that was a no go. My reading skills are pretty weak in the areas of comprehension and picking up on symbolic clues (oh, you mean the recurring ducks in Catcher in the Rye were supposed to actually represent something???) already, so when you throw me into a seriously experimental or avant-garde read like this and give me no support I'm gonna feel pretty darn stupid. I didn't even benefit from the occasional beautiful passage. I just didn't get it. It's sooooo short though, that if anybody wants to throw me a bone I could go back and give it another whirl!
All that being said, I LOVE art that stretches the boundaries of what's expected.
All that being said, I LOVE art that stretches the boundaries of what's expected.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews