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“... violated social and artistic tabus. Transgression always evokes pious horror among those who, in Auden’s words, ‘would rather be ruined than changed’. But these transgressions were acts of conscience, imagination and love. Most of Kermode’s authors came to regret their transgressions. The ‘Thirties myth’, articulated first by Orwell, received its ...”

“... In ‘The Cave of Making’, his elegy for MacNeice, Auden describes his friend as a ‘lover of women and Donegal’. The geography seems a bit wrong – the Irish counties in MacNeice’s heart were surely Antrim and Galway – but the terms are apt enough for the man in the poems: a lover, certainly, and of both women and the land of his birth ...”

“... than not. Of course every poet appoints his own ancestors but that’s one thing if you’re Auden enlisting Byron, another if you’re nobody claiming Auden. Let me present, then (like one of those not quite kosher relations in Jane Austen), my mite of collateral evidence connecting me with Wystan. First, prep ...”

“... Thirties, though popular as a source of anecdote, were mainly thought of with fond condescension. Auden and Spender had lashed themselves with twigs and been forgiven, and their ‘politics’ had come to be viewed as something of a pose – an interesting pose, with some painful and marvellous offshoots, but in essence a bit silly. With Upward, though, there ...”

“... the ‘new literary experience’ are resuscitating a native Modernism (shakily embodied by early Auden and Edwin Muir). The strangeness secreted within British traditions has been re-invigorated by the East European example, he thinks, and now permeates texts such as Christopher Reid’s Katerina Brac (or, one might add, his own Audenesque reports ‘From ...”

“... And on the occasion of his death, Kingsley Amis declared that Day Lewis, ‘less clever than Auden, less ebullient than MacNeice ... may well turn out to be more durably satisfying than either’. This was, perhaps, just coffin-smoothing on Amis’s part, an expression of hope rather than expectation: Gelpi, however, attempts to make it so. He discerns ...”

“... And in this, as in most things, his approach was methodical, reasoned and fastidious, even fussy. Auden writes somewhere that it’s good for a poet to have hobbies like gardening and cooking. This advice struck me as sound and I commend it to young writers. Thom, who was often compared to Auden on account of being ...”

“... America’), H.G. Wells (‘Futuristic America’), D.H. Lawrence (‘Primitive America’), W.H. Auden (‘Theological America’), Aldous Huxley (Psychedelic America’), and Christopher Isherwood (‘Mystical America’). As the chapter titles suggest, each of these writers is supposed to see America as if it were shaped by a literary genre or in ...”

“... China was a surprise to Auden and Isherwood – it reminded them of Surrey. Faber had commissioned them to write a travel book about the Far East early in the summer of 1937. The Japanese invaded northern China in July, capturing Peking; by August the troops had reached Shanghai and the itinerary of the book was decided ...”

“... poetry in the popular imagination is the bit in Four Weddings and a Funeral when John Hannah reads Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ over Simon Callow’s coffin. Astley remarks: ‘Poems about death also help others to gain inner strength by sharing in the writer’s experience of facing death and bereavement at a time when they themselves are still being tossed ...”

“... and decisiveness, and also generosity. He wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1975 a review of Auden’s Thank you, Fog which is also an obituary. After quoting stanzas in which Auden salutes Horace and Goethe, Murray wrote: A lot of us have worked through all these influences and more in less than a lifetime – but ...”

“... to joke about the process: I didn’t want my next poem to be exactly like Yeats or exactly like Auden since in that case where the hell was I? but what instead did I want it to sound like? Schwartz made his mark just before the Second World War when Modernism was at its most popular, and it was in this tradition that Allen Tate saw his first book, In ...”

“... rented by George Davis – literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar at the time – and tenanted by Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee; shorter-term residents included Louis MacNeice, Auden’s lover Chester Kallman and Salvador Dali. The poem consists of a monologue by each of these. Like ...”

“... to ‘look at me in my bath. Hot stuff, don’t you think?’ Elsewhere again, we learn that Auden may have envied him his large penis. ‘Did I really like Wystan?’ he was capable of asking himself, in the course of absorbing evocations of his ‘witch-doctor’ alter ego, in Ian Hamilton’s designation. Auden and ...”

“... called him, a poet. His juniors have not always thought well of his verses, and in spite of Auden’s pronouncement that it was his capacity for humiliation that made him a poet, there were periods when he declined to publish verse out of fear of reviewers. He has evidently got over that worry, and now at 76 produces another Collected Poems – an ...”