Saturday, March 8, 2008

Auden & America

A retrospective look at Auden and his time:
http://www.nysun.com/article/72350


"Even those leaden meditations on "nature and history" were impishly transformed in his verse. In "Archaeology," the last poem Auden wrote, in August 1973, a month before his death, he stated:

From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all

our school text-books lie.
What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of,

being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.?

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