Talk:Robert Medley

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Medley and Auden

This page formerly had a statement that Medley was Auden's lover at Gresham's and that Medley was openly gay; but Medley says explicitly in his memoir Drawn from the Life that he and Auden were lovers only afterwards, and apparently only once, when Auden was at Oxford. Medley did not discover that he was gay until after he left school. Medley writes that he had simply misunderstood Auden's intentions at Gresham's, but Medley believed himself to be heterosexual at the time, and didn't understand Auden's intentions until much later. Macspaunday 06:01, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Valuable information. Only gripe: Auden seems to have placed Medley very high in his pantheon of loves, something which is not evident from the article at the moment. Haiduc 17:43, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Patience will always be rewarded: Medley had a long and distinguished career, including his work in changing the arts curriculum in the UK, which clearly requires a lot more attention than his appearance on one (and only one) of the hundred or so lists of poems, persons, places, titles, that Auden wrote in his surviving notebooks over the years (The only reason the particular list that you refer to was quoted in print was that it included Rhoda Jaffee, and was written around the time he knew her, and biographers used it as independent confirmation of his feelings for her.) Auden writes interestingly and tellingly about Medley in relation to his (Auden's) feelings about Medley and Doone, and that requires far less interpretation than a list of names.

As you can see, and with the help of your comments and observations, I am doing my best to keep up to Wikipedia standards, which seem to require that the few bits of information that I happen to know already ought not to outweigh the thousands of bits of information that I still need to find out from the printed sources (which are far more extensive than I've even begun to list).

Incredibly, no one had made a page on Rupert Doone with whom Medley lived and worked for forty years and who had a great influence on English drama and dance. No one except Medley could bear to spend any time with Doone, but that doesn't diminish his interest. Macspaunday 18:17, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]