Auden's Apologies for Poetry (Princeton Legacy Library, 1059)

Review "Lucy McDiarmid is the most original and important Auden critic to appear in many years. Auden's Apologies for Poetry offers brilliant new readings of the major later works, from New Year Letter to 'The Cave of Making.' This book should mark the beginning of a new understanding of those works and a markedly higher valuing of them. It will compel a fundamental reassessment of the Auden canon." Samuel Hynes, Princeton University Product Description 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 Commenting on all the major poems and essays from the 1930s through the 1960s, and analyzing manuscript revisions and unpublished works, it charts the changes in Auden's poetics in the light of his shift from an oral to a written model of poetry.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. Review "Lucy McDiarmid is the most original and important Auden critic to appear in many years. Auden's Apologies for Poetry offers brilliant new readings of the major later works, from New Year Letter to 'The Cave of Making.' This book should mark the beginning of a new understanding of those works and a markedly higher valuing of them. It will compel a fundamental reassessment of the Auden canon." Samuel Hynes, Princeton University From the Inside Flap "Lucy McDiarmid is the most original and important Auden critic to appear in many years. Auden's Apologies for Poetry offers brilliant new readings of the major later works, from New Year Letter to 'The Cave of Making.' This book should mark the beginning of a new understanding of those works and a markedly higher valuing of them. It will compel a fundamental reassessment of the Auden canon."--Samuel Hynes, Princeton University From the Back Cover "Lucy McDiarmid is the most original and important Auden critic to appear in many years. Auden's Apologies for Poetry offers brilliant new readings of the major later works, from New Year Letter to 'The Cave of Making.' This book should mark the beginning of a new understandi
Author: McDiarmid, Professor Lucy

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Binding: Hardcover

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0691067848

ISBN-13: 9780691067841