The richly detailed follow-up to Early Auden (not reviewed), Mendelson’s well-received study of the poet’s most notable period. With unparalleled access as executor of Auden’s literary estate, Mendelson (English and Comparative Literature/Columbia) blazes a scholarly trail ending in Auden’s “private spheres” as an expatriate poet and lecturer after the “public chaos” of WWII, which was preceded by his formative, more eventful experiences of the 1930s. Here he takes Auden at his word when he wrote “anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, into a poem”, and nothing, however obscure, escapes Mendelson. While the poetry that made Auden famous was created in Britain, this later period includes major, rich works such as The Age of Anxiety, the tour de force The Sea and the Mirror, and the anthology favorites The Shield of Achilles and “In Praise of Limestone”—all of which Mendelson exhaustively unpacks, making good use of drafts, correspondence, and Auden’s own literary criticism. With these and much of Auden’s prolific output, he elucidates both their relation to the poet’s personal life, which was dominated by his rise-and-fall affair with Chester Kallman, and his personal mythology, with its high-church Christianity and Jungian inclinations. While Mendelson ably keeps up with Auden’s restless intellectual existence, which absorbed Kierkegaard and Tillich, among others, he underplays his early legacy, especially the influences of Freud and Marx, whom Auden could not fully expel from his creative pantheon. Just as Mendelson assisted Humphrey Carpenter with researching his masterly biography of Auden in 1981, here he provides an invaluable academic trove. Not a critical study so much as a biography of Auden’s poetry itself that is comprehensive in situating the work in the life.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-18408-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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