Auden and the Muse of History

"The beauty of Gottlieb's copiously productive engagement with Auden's 'marriage of inconvenience' between the poetic and the historic lies in her refusal to offer us any consolation in the turbulence of meanings or morals. In staying with Auden's anxiety of tone and temper, Gottlieb reveals her own integrity as an impeccable scholarly reader with a fine understanding of the give and take, the ebb and flow, of the performance of poetic justice."-Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University "Auden and the Muse of History brings new depths to Auden studies, while bringing Auden's work into sharp and revelatory focus. Gottlieb shows how the poems speak forcefully to today's world, while also showing how deeply rooted they were in the world where they were written."-Edward Mendelson, Columbia University "Gottlieb's excellent close readings of poems and [her] efforts to situate Auden within his cultural moment will be informative for a broad range of readers. The writing style is accessible, which further recommends the book as useful to nonspecialists. Highly recommended."-J. W. Moffett, CHOICE "Gottlieb invites us to recognize the contemporary import of Auden's critiques of dishonest history-making-above all in his self-retractions and his gestures toward poems that cannot be written, whether about the Shoah or as a self-verifying expression of 'I love you.' What she has made, herself, is a work that may be called 'academic literary criticism' but whose form and argument pay homage to other genres as well: poetry, of course, but also music, whose muse is not Clio at all."-Richard R. Bozorth, Genre