Friday, October 11, 2013

Why he means so much to many …

… W. H. Auden: poet, friend, panacea by Neilson MacKay - The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It’s tricky to see a title like What Ezra Pound Can Do For You sticking. Even William Carlos Williams, H. D., and T. S. Eliot might have trouble pulling it off. They do plenty for us, of course, but they are not our friends. (Still, I’ve always seen Auden as more of an uncle, like an agnate of Richard Griffiths’ Uncle Monty from the 1987 black comedy Withnail and I, whose stockpile of camp aphorisms—including “It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will never play the Dane’”—are about as Audenesque as you can get.)

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