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Search Results: auden

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    On the anniversary of a poet's birth, a universal message to nations

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 20 February 2024

    ‘The loss of memory by a nation is also a loss of its conscience.’ As the loss of conscience grows with each succeeding generation, one day righting the boat on the sea of forgetfulness will become impossible. In the end, what people don’t know, they won’t miss. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Clive James' poetry of memento mori

    • Philip Harvey
    • 29 November 2019
    12 Comments

    Obituarists sharpened their quills in 2014 when word had it the death of Clive James was imminent. Since then we have witnessed a late flowering of poetry, reviews and articles tinged with mortality that revealed to the last his Twainian flair for journalistic self-promotion, albeit in the internet age. Now the quills are out in earnest.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Pigeon English: a 'lost' Les Murray interview

    • Philip Harvey
    • 06 May 2019
    10 Comments

    'English became the best pigeon in the world, it picked up stuff from everywhere.' In this never-before-heard interview from 2013, the late great poet Les Murray reflects on his work, on language, and on what poetry actually 'does'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Auden dines with Barry Humphries

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 05 March 2013
    1 Comment

    What I fear is that on Judgment Day one's punishment will be to hear God reciting by heart the poems I would have written had my life been good.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The epiphanies of our lives

    • B.N. Oakman
    • 10 July 2012
    4 Comments

    I want  you to list the epiphanies in your lives, says the lecturer. We'll build poems around them...  I ponder, but cannot manage to think of one. Does he really believe people have several? My extra years are like binoculars peered through from the wrong end, shrinking past significance to present inconsequence.

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  • MEDIA

    Elitism in online dictionaries

    • Philip Harvey
    • 27 March 2012
    19 Comments

    Free dictionaries on the internet are often bland and incomplete, while those that are complex and exhaustive require a credit card. Quality comes at a price, and this is an increasing educational issue. Rich institutions and individuals can pay for the words we all use, while others cannot, or just do not.

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  • RELIGION

    Strange encounters on the Spanish Camino

    • Tony Doherty
    • 14 October 2009
    5 Comments

    We entered the house expecting the warm hospitality usually offered to weary pilgrims. But a small ancient man barred our way and attacked us with a venom normally reserved for carriers of some ancient plague, snarling like an enraged guard dog.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Football, sex and poetry

    • Sarah Kanowski
    • 02 June 2009
    7 Comments

    Sex scandals can make celebrities out of the most unlikely figures. But just how similar is the case of the Oxford poetry professorship candidate accused of sexually harrassing his students, and Australian Rugby League's group sex scandal?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The human face of a 'metaphorical' poet

    • Garry Kinnane
    • 04 March 2009
    6 Comments

    In 1972 Auden abandoned New York to live at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was given a cottage in the grounds, and was expected to give occasional talks and be available to students. It turned out not to be the success everyone had hoped for.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Comradely with Ginsberg

    • Philip Harvey
    • 21 November 2008

    Although not a beat poem, a Peter Steele poem shares Ginsberg's aesthetic of the poem as measure of breath. Breath is commanding like an original lecture, enspiriting like a true sermon, propulsive like a perfect dinner conversation.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Keneally's mature insights into character

    • Tony Smith
    • 15 May 2007

    To the extent that novels exist to provide insights into character, minds and decisions, Tom Keneally's new novel is arguably his best.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Knowledge that eludes the search engine

    • Philip Harvey
    • 08 March 2007
    2 Comments

    The poetry of Peter Steele is well-tempered, even when the subject is not. His themes are often modesty, doubt and brokenness, but his uses his grand style to produce measured tones and educated observations.

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