The table talk of W.H. Auden
In New York, between 1946 and 1948, the scholar and poet Alan Ansen made rapid notes of Auden's inimitable conversation. This book is a record of Auden's private, offhand and sometimes wayward remarks and opinions about art, literature, music, politics, religion and sexuality.
Opera Addict: The Rake’s Progress and W.H. Auden’s Operatic Theory
The article demonstrates how W.H. Auden’s newfound knowledge of the operatic tradition influenced his approach to writing the libretto for The Rake’s Progress, his 1951 collaboration with co-librettist Chester Kallman and composer Igor Stravinsky. It contends that the opera’s protagonist, Tom Rakewell, ironically dramatizes Auden’s evolving ideas about the singular capacities of music and opera to represent the subjective experience of the will’s free movement within the bounds of time. Forsaking any claim to realist objectivity, The Rake’s Progress celebrates artifice as it explores the relationships between tradition and innovation, cyclicality and linearity, and recurrence and becoming.
Microcosmus: From Anaximandros to Paracelsus
The ideas expressed by the names of Microcosmus and Macrocosmus have never lost their attraction for speculative minds since the time they first made their appearance in early Greek philosophy. There have been ages in which these ideas receded more or less into the background, others in which they played a rather dominating rôle. It seems worth while to inquire into the nature of these ideas and to study the spirit of those ages which felt them congenial to their total mentality. One might also try to determine those notions and principles with which the idea of the microcosm came to be associated during its long history. Even a superficial survey of the ages to which the notion of microcosm particularly appealed, and of the ideas with which it entered into combinations, seems to show that this idea might be considered as a kind of “symptom”, a characteristic to be found mainly with a certain type of historical mentality.