Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

 
The death of Thom Gunn marks the end of what I had viewed as one of the most important bodies of work in modern literature. Certainly, he had always seemed to me to be the most important poet since Auden. Where most twentieth century poetry retreated either into a sense of quirky parochialism (Larkin, Betjeman) or into solipsistic romanticism (Hughes), Gunn had always seemed ably to effortlessly offer a via media between romanticism and realism.

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posted by Richard 7:29 pm