Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden

I read The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden earlier this month. Below are some key quotes from this text.

(P.3/ para 3) "The 'Auden effect' lay in that ability to catch the changing moods of the time in luminous images, magical phrases and breathtaking apercus, expressing sentiments that people were unaware they shared until they read him."

(P.7/ para 2) "For the younger Larkin Auden was of course the first "modern poet", not just in his ability to employ modern properties unselfconsciously but primarily in the 'dominant and ubiquitous unease' at the heart of his poetry. Auden's outlook was completely dislocated..."

(P.9/ para 3) "...his sleeping around with poetic forms and his plagiarism of other poet's voices, constitute a deliberate assault on the idea of autonomous authentic self, speaking with its own unique accents." "All art is ventriloquism."

(P.11/ para 3) "He denounced Stephen Dedalus' remark...as an impossible ambition, since it is precisely this attempt to escape being a historical creature that makes man's history a nightmare..."

(P.13/ para 3) "Art is born of humiliation."  "(Auden was) The first poet at home in the 20th century."

(P.17/ para 4) "...his language and anxieties in the early 1930s entranced the young intelligentsia...they heard...political injustice and human pain clarified and amplified in his words."

(P.19/ para 3) "Many of his young admirers felt betrayed by the departure...the belief that he had deserted Britain during a dangerous crisis..." (seems an interesting pop-parallel when Bob Dylan went electric in the mid-1960s, and many in the folk community criticized him for selling out. Martin Scorcher's documentary No Direction Home outlines this process of following one's art, and the resultant alienation of some followers).