For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (W.H. Auden: Critical Editions)
"[Auden's] four long poems . . . remain the astounding heart of his work. . . . InFor the Time Being, the most successful of these poems, [the characters] are at once participants in the Nativity story and drunken New Yorkers."--Adam Gopnik,New Yorker"Beautiful."--Mark Schorer,New York TimesThe oratorio . . . carries [its theme] through a series of resourceful modulations to a music-hall finale, setting the Flight into Egypt--'the Land of Unlikeness'--against a real-estate development of the Waste Land. The perplexities and strivings of the intellectual, the man with the mirror, are profoundly grasped and impressively orchestrated. . . . Auden, like most intelligent believers, affirms a positive faith by a kind of double negation, a denial of doubt, a questioning of skepticism. He is more adept at burying Caesar than at praising Christ, more anxious for a Messiah than confident in the Revelation."--Harry Levin,New Republic"'The Christmas Oratorio' contains very fine passages, is amusing as well as being serious, and . . . has the power in some of the choruses, of bringing to mind the mighty chorales of Bach."--Stephen Spender,Time and Tide"[A] long-awaited, happy-making edition. . . . I am incapable of reading the last pages ofFor the Time Beingwithout tears. . . . The trip will be surreal, asFor the Time Beingoften is, but it will end asFor the Time Beingends, with 'joy.'"--John Timpane,Philadelphia Inquirer