Hugo von Hofmannsthal

#2

"Hugo von Hofmannsthal made his mark as a poet, as a playwright, and as the librettist for Richard Strauss's greatest operas, but he was no less accomplished as a writer of short, strangely evocative prose works. The atmospheric stories and sketches collected here - fin de siecle fairy tales from the Vienna of Klimt and Freud, a number of them never before translated into English propel the reader into a shadowy world of uncanny fates and secret desires. An aristocrat from Paris in the plague years shares a single night of passion with an unknown woman, a cavalry sergeant meets his double on the battlefield, an orphaned man withdraws from the world with his four servants, each of whom has a mysterious power over his destiny." "The most influential of all of Hofmannsthal's writings is the title story, a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he is no longer able to write. The "Letter" not only symbolized Hofmannsthal's own turn away from poetry, it captured the psychological crisis of faith and language which was to define the twentieth century."--Jacket.

#3

Housman was not only a poet but also a master of a highly individual prose style. Here is a selection of Housman's writings, both scholarly and general, gathered from periodicals and other out-of-the-way sources, which decisively confirms his reputation as a prose stylist. The prefaces, the adversaria and the reviews, in particular, give even the layman an idea of the precision and the penetration of exact scholarship. Housman's comments and judgments on other men illuminated his own nature: withdrawn, austere, even crusty, yet gentle with the unassuming; ruthless in exposure of arrogance and pretension.