About collaboration he wrote in Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective. His literary executor , Edward Mendelson , argues in his introduction to Selected Poems that Auden's practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it.
Auden began writing poems in , at fifteen, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, especially Wordsworth , and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas Hardy. At eighteen he discovered T. Eliot and adopted an extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his own voice at twenty when he wrote the first poem later included in his collected work, "From the very first coming down". Twenty of these poems appeared in his first book Poems , a pamphlet hand-printed by Stephen Spender.
In he wrote his first dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides , subtitled "A Charade", which combined style and content from the Icelandic sagas with jokes from English school life. This mixture of tragedy and farce, with a dream play-within-a-play, introduced the mixed styles and content of much of his later work. A recurrent theme in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts", Auden's term for the powerful, unseen psychological effects of preceding generations on any individual life and the title of a poem.
Early Travels and Publications
A parallel theme, present throughout his work, is the contrast between biological evolution unchosen and involuntary and the psychological evolution of cultures and individuals voluntary and deliberate even in its subconscious aspects. Auden's next large-scale work was The Orators: An English Study ; revised editions, , , in verse and prose, largely about hero-worship in personal and political life. In his shorter poems, his style became more open and accessible, and the exuberant "Six Odes" in The Orators reflect his new interest in Robert Burns. During these years, much of his work expressed left-wing views, and he became widely known as a political poet although he was privately more ambivalent about revolutionary politics than many reviewers recognised, [46] and Mendelson argues that he expounded political views partly out of a sense of moral duty and partly because it enhanced his reputation, and that he later regretted having done so.
His verse drama The Dance of Death was a political extravaganza in the style of a theatrical revue, which Auden later called "a nihilistic leg-pull. The Ascent of F6 , another play written with Isherwood, was partly an anti-imperialist satire, partly in the character of the self-destroying climber Michael Ransom an examination of Auden's own motives in taking on a public role as a political poet. In Auden's publisher chose the title Look, Stranger! Auden was now arguing that an artist should be a kind of journalist, and he put this view into practice in Letters from Iceland a travel book in prose and verse written with Louis MacNeice , which included his long social, literary, and autobiographical commentary "Letter to Lord Byron".
Journey to a War a travel book in prose and verse, was written with Isherwood after their visit to the Sino-Japanese War. Auden's shorter poems now engaged with the fragility and transience of personal love "Danse Macabre", "The Dream", "Lay your sleeping head" , a subject he treated with ironic wit in his "Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson " which included "Tell Me the Truth About Love" and the revised version of " Funeral Blues " , and also the corrupting effect of public and official culture on individual lives "Casino", "School Children", "Dover". The elegies for Yeats and Freud are partly anti-heroic statements, in which great deeds are performed, not by unique geniuses whom others cannot hope to imitate, but by otherwise ordinary individuals who were "silly like us" Yeats or of whom it could be said "he wasn't clever at all" Freud , and who became teachers of others, not awe-inspiring heroes.
In Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year Letter", which appeared with miscellaneous notes and other poems in The Double Man At the time of his return to the Anglican Communion he began writing abstract verse on theological themes, such as "Canzone" and "Kairos and Logos". Around , as he became more comfortable with religious themes, his verse became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly used the syllabic verse he had learned from the poetry of Marianne Moore. Auden's work in this era addresses the artist's temptation to use other persons as material for his art rather than valuing them for themselves "Prospero to Ariel" and the corresponding moral obligation to make and keep commitments while recognising the temptation to break them "In Sickness and Health".
A Baroque Eclogue published separately in Auden , with most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions. The Romantic Iconography of the Sea , based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature. While writing this, he also wrote " Bucolics ," a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to nature. Both sequences appeared in his next book, The Shield of Achilles , with other short poems, including the book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier".
In —56 Auden wrote a group of poems about "history", the term he used to mean the set of unique events made by human choices, as opposed to "nature", the set of involuntary events created by natural processes, statistics, and anonymous forces such as crowds. In the late s Auden's style became less rhetorical while its range of styles increased. In , having moved his summer home from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno"; other poems from this period include "Dichtung und Wahrheit: An Unwritten Poem", a prose poem about the relation between love and personal and poetic language, and the contrasting "Dame Kind", about the anonymous impersonal reproductive instinct.
These and other poems, including his —66 poems about history, appeared in Homage to Clio All these appeared in City Without Walls His lifelong passion for Icelandic legend culminated in his verse translation of The Elder Edda A Commonplace Book was a kind of self-portrait made up of favourite quotations with commentary, arranged in alphabetical order by subject.
His last completed poem was "Archaeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later years.
Auden's stature in modern literature has been contested. Probably the most common critical view from the s onward ranked him as the last and least of the three major twentieth-century British and Irish poets, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, while a minority view, more prominent in recent years, ranks him as the highest of the three.
Leavis who wrote that Auden's ironic style was "self-defensive, self-indulgent or merely irresponsible", [58] and Harold Bloom who wrote "Close thy Auden, open thy [Wallace] Stevens ," [59] to the obituarist in The Times London , who wrote: Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry.
Critical estimates were divided from the start. Reviewing Auden's first book, Poems , Naomi Mitchison wrote "If this is really only the beginning, we have perhaps a master to look forward to. I read, shuddered, and knew. Auden's departure for America in was debated in Britain once even in Parliament , with some seeing his emigration as a betrayal.
Defenders of Auden such as Geoffrey Grigson , in an introduction to a anthology of modern poetry, wrote that Auden "arches over all". In the US, starting in the late s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden's regular stanzas became influential; John Ashbery recalled that in the s Auden "was the modern poet".
From the s through the s, many critics lamented that Auden's work had declined from its earlier promise; Randall Jarrell wrote a series of essays making a case against Auden's later work, [69] and Philip Larkin 's "What's Become of Wystan? The first full-length study of Auden was Richard Hoggart 's Auden: An Introductory Essay , which concluded that "Auden's work, then, is a civilising force.
Spears' The Poetry of W. The Disenchanted Island , "written out of the conviction that Auden's poetry can offer the reader entertainment, instruction, intellectual excitement, and a prodigal variety of aesthetic pleasures, all in a generous abundance that is unique in our time.
Auden was one of three candidates recommended by the Nobel Committee to the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize in Literature in [74] and [75] and six recommended for the prize. Another group of critics and poets has maintained that unlike other modern poets, Auden's reputation did not decline after his death, and the influence of his later writing was especially strong on younger American poets including John Ashbery , James Merrill , Anthony Hecht , and Maxine Kumin.
Public recognition of Auden's work sharply increased after his "Funeral Blues" "Stop all the clocks" was read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral ; subsequently, a pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love , sold more than , copies. After 11 September his poem "September 1, " was widely circulated and frequently broadcast. Overall, Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content.
Memorial stones and plaques commemorating Auden include those in Westminster Abbey ; at his birthplace at 55 Bootham, York; [86] near his home on Lordswood Road, Birmingham; [87] in the chapel of Christ Church, Oxford; on the site of his apartment at 1 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn Heights; at his apartment in 77 St. Marks Place, New York damaged and now removed [88] and at the site of his death at Walfischgasse 5 in Vienna; [89] in his house in Kirchstetten, his study is open to the public upon request.
The following list includes only the books of poems and essays that Auden prepared during his lifetime; for a more complete list, including other works and posthumous editions, see W. In the list below, works reprinted in the Complete Works of W. Auden are indicated by footnote references. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Auden used the phrase "Anglo-American Poets" in , implicitly referring to himself and T. Retrieved 25 May See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in Chambers 20th Century Dictionary.
See also the definition "a native or descendant of a native of England who has settled in or become a citizen of America, esp. The Cambridge Companion to W. His remains were reburied at Repton , Derbyshire, where they became the object of a cult; the parish church of Repton is dedicated to St Wystan. Retrieved 12 October Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online ed. Retrieved 26 May The Idea of North. North Pennines Heritage Trust.
W.h. Auden | theranchhands.com
The Prolific and the Devourer. Retrieved 2 December A Guide to twentieth century literature in English. Essays by Divers Hands London: Jonathan Cape, title details at books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Britten and Auden in the Thirties: Prose and travel books in prose and verse, Volume I: Bucknell, Katherine; Jenkins, Nicholas, eds.
Wystan Hugh Auden
In Solitude, For Company: Auden after , unpublished prose and recent criticism Auden Studies 3. The Story of W. Auden in Kirchstetten neu gestaltet". Retrieved 30 September Auden Dies in Vienna". The New York Times. Retrieved 20 September Collected Shorter Poems, — Mendelson, Edward , ed. Selected Poems, new edition. Plays and other dramatic writings by W. Libretti and other dramatic writings by W. Randall Jarrell on W. To a midth-century ear, tetrameter would always seem to have a rhyme planned ahead, but alliteration is what English used to bind ideas before it used rhyme, and that's good enough this time for the proudly nordic Auden: The never-fulfilled expectation of rhyme is a suitable curse on any lonesome quartet of drinkers at any bar, a milieu that Auden calls "an unprejudiced space where nothing particular ever happens".
Unsurprisingly Malin, Quant, Rosetta and Emble all sound like Auden, who wrote some lively charades but wasn't really a playwright. Then again, because they sound like Auden, what they say is mostly brilliant, beautiful, or both. Here is Malin's description of the death of an airman: After several pages of the poem one is aware only of Auden. I defy anyone new to the poem to conceal the characters' names and correctly guess which of the four is talking.
Auden's prose introduction to them furnishes us with one man who happens to know his mythology, one man who is "trying to recapture the old atmosphere of laboratory and lecture-hall", a woman who daydreams of "those landscapes familiar to all readers of English detective stories" and a young man "fully conscious of the attraction of his uniform to both sexes".
That is to say, Auden fourfold. When it becomes clear that the puppet-master has handed out abstractions to all his characters — Malin is "Thought", Quant "Intuition", Rosetta "Feeling" and Emble "Sensation" — one can sympathise with the Horizon reviewer who called the poem "a re-hash of Auden's psychology divided by four". John Berryman, who regarded Auden as "one of the best living poets", none the less called them "the four vaguest characters in modern literature". Auden's burned-out Manhattanites are under no more obligation to chat in American slang than Hamlet is to murmur in Middle Danish.
The speeches are meant to be taken as inward monologues, dream-soliloquies, while the uniform shape of utterance suggests a commonality, a shared and inescapable plight. Verse should be neither too free nor too formed, as human experience is also neither: But for all its local wonders, its unceasing appeal to grace and intelligence — plus some welcome bursts of satiric laughter — there is something formally wrong with "The Age of Anxiety".
If one is going to create puppets then one has to make them move, and they don't. They don't really move each other, let alone us. They begin in thought — "Quant was thinking", "Malin thought", "Emble was thinking" — and move into conversation — "Malin suggested" "Quant approved", "So did Rosetta" — but in their actual speeches they show only the faintest traces of attention to one another. In the third section, "The Seven Stages", Auden has them leaving the bar behind, not literally, but, by dint of being drunk, fanning out into a dream-landscape on a spiritual quest is any drink that good?
The quest requires that at one point the four ascend "the same steep pass", the only physical effect of which is to shorten their speeches, but paradoxically this causes them to sound more than ever like projections of abstractions: One voice hardly ever responds to what another has said, as if the four abstractions were true oppositions, or sealed off from each other like the four elements.
Those may be, but voices aren't. The fifth section, "The Masque", set in Rosetta's apartment, with Malin ogling Emble and Emble pawing Rosetta, would seem to require the most interaction, but the four remain symbolic mouthpieces, and when Emble and Rosetta dance and finally kiss, they render the following sweet nothings:. And so to bed. It's easy to chuckle at this, but it's merely the sound of a form stretched to its furthest premise and, well. And yet there are traces of beautifully resonant writing, evoking the moment, bringing human faces close to our own, throughout "The Age of Anxiety" — they're just all in prose.
Malin is watching Emble and Rosetta flirting. He "had been building a little altar of sandwiches. Now he placed an olive upon it and invoked the Queen of love". A little while before, when the group arrives at Rosetta's place, they "all felt that it was time something exciting happened and decided to do their best to see that it did.
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Had they been perfectly honest with themselves, they would have had to admit that they were tired and wanted to go home alone to bed. Rosetta, having seen the older men to the elevator, finds Emble comatose on her bed: One must love Auden's poetry to be able to speak this heresy, but I can't help wondering what fun he might have had — we might have had — with, instead of the poem, a wartime novel in the vein of Henry Green or Elizabeth Bowen. In virtually the last words of the poem something is revealed: Abstractions can't change, so they don't listen.
A lesser poet wrote a greater poem for the age of anxiety: