Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
W. H. Auden
-
Standard Name: Auden, W. H.
Used Form: Wystan Hugh Auden
WHA
has been called the outstanding poet of his generation. His prolific output of poetry is endlessly versatile, often deeply personal but usually also carrying political freight, often experimental, combining the classical and the colloquial, the lyric and the deliberately prosaic. He wrote a great deal in collaboration, often for stage or even operatic performance. He was a riveting lecturer and an unsystematic but always stimulating literary critic.
Edmund Wilson
disliked this work, apparently because the communist in it is just as ridiculous as the stockbroker, so that no authoritative, authorized, left-wing voice is supplied.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
406
But its success was stunning.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
405
Literary responses
Naomi Mitchison
Winifred Holtby
, writing in The Bookman, ranked this novel as the most important of the year (a year that saw the appearance of Woolf
's The Waves),
Squier, Susan M., and Naomi Mitchison. “Naomi Mitchison: The Feminist Art of Making Things Difficult”. Solution Three, Feminist Press at The City University of New York, pp. 161-83.
165-6
and its author as...
Literary responses
A. E. Housman
The volume was not an instant success, though it was later admired by authors such as E. M. Forster
and W. H. Auden
.
Parker, Peter, editor. A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press.
345-6
Literary responses
Stella Benson
Naomi Mitichison assured SB
that the young Auden
was fearfully interested in her poems (which Mitchison had been quoting).
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz.
136
Literary responses
Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan
, however, applies a withering pen to WC
in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Literary responses
Adrienne Rich
W. H. Auden
, with genuine admiration but instinctive condescension, praised Rich's poems as neatly and modestly dressed. He found them like good girls who speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maggie Gee
Her central figure, Alfred White, a park-keeper in a London borough based on that of Brent, is an old-fashioned ex-soldier who combines integrity, compassion, and intense pride in his job, with a violent temper...
Intertextuality and Influence
Naomi Mitchison
This indicates how the second world war turned her thoughts back towards the first. She noted the feeling of being on a small island of sand, cut off from past and future, and how wireless...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Jennings
As a teenager, EJ
read T. S. Eliot
and (as she put it) wrote long poems of sort of vers libre which I imagined were influenced by Eliot, and which were very personal, in fact...
Intertextuality and Influence
Carol Ann Duffy
Duffy answers back not just to male historical figures but (as a reviewer pointed out) to the male poets who have re-imagined such figures, like Auden
in The Fall of Icarus. Elsewhere she remarks...
Intertextuality and Influence
Liz Lochhead
The Recitations (poems in which the speaking voice is crucial, most of them sharply Scots-vernacular comments on sexual or gender relations) include the title piece, Bagpipe Muzak, Glasgow 1990. This laments (in a nice...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Ridler
AR
wrote that the two great influences on her as a poet (because they helped her to find her own voice) were Sir Thomas Wyatt
and W. H. Auden
. Eliot
, too, was inescapable...
Intertextuality and Influence
Monica Furlong
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer noted in Travelling In a host of quotations from old and new sources: from studies in Zen Buddhism
, the Tao te Ching, the Theologica Germanica, and Julian of Norwich
