LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: Auden

  • Impossible, improbable, and infinitely full

    Impossible, improbable, and infinitely full

    It’ll be Shenandoah‘s 75th anniversary in 2025 and celebrations are beginning. First up, an exhibition at W&L’s Leyburn Library curated by Editor in Chief Beth Staples and students. It features precious and startling items from the archive. For example, poems and letters from Langston Hughes and E. E. Cummings are on display, and, more unusually,…

  • Thrushes, worms, and bibliomemoir

    What can amateur accounts of literature do better than conventional literary criticism? That’s the question I brought to two recent bibliomemoirs: Alexander McCall Smith’s What W.H. Auden Can Do For You (from Princeton and Oxford’s Writers on Writers series, 2013) and Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (Crown, 2014). The main answers seem to be:…