Strength of Poetry Oxford Lectures

"W. H. Auden, Fenton's guiding star, pops up everywhere and is the subject of four chapters. Fenton's final lecture-sermon considers Auden's vexed marriage to Chester Kallman: 'to be conscious but to refuse to understand, to live not in a fine but in a lean country, to hold to what was most difficult, to face that which was most hostile...' This is Saint Wystan: high rhetoric, and highly effective. Academic litcrit tucked up its skirts and ran up the beach to escape the tide of such old-fashioned, impassioned advocacy. These lectures were not universally popular when Fenton delivered them in Eagletonian Oxford--but they are as good and as eccentric as Robert Graves's, or Auden's own. "Fenton, James is the author of 'Strength of Poetry Oxford Lectures', published 2002 under ISBN 9780374528485 and ISBN 0374528489.