In the following essay, Deane explores Auden's theoretical assumptions, linguistic techniques, and open-ended relationship with the reader in "New Year Letter."
In the following essay, Jacobs examines Auden's communitarian sympathies and moral vision. According to Jacobs, "Auden understood both the costs and benefits of choosing to cultivate local knowledge and local attachments better than almost any political thinker writing about such issues today."
In the following essay, Hynes discusses Auden's emigration to the United States, his preoccupation with history and art, and "New Year Letter" as a reflection of Auden's historical sensibility.
In the following essay, Caserio discusses Auden's attitudes toward civic allegiance, the significance of his emigration to the United States, and the association of homosexuality with exile.
In the following essay, McFarland examines the significance of Roman satiric verse and the conventions of the cena, a Roman banquet, in "Tonight at Seven-Thirty."
In the following essay, France examines Auden's historical perspective and juxtaposition of Latin and Gothic Christianity in his "In Praise of Limestone."
In an essay-review of Loren Eiseley's The Unexpected Universe in 1970, W. H. Auden identifies genuine laughter with the "spirit of Carnival" and insists that "when we truly laugh, we laugh simultaneously with and at" [Auden's emphasis]. That is, genuine laughter and the Carnival spirit are both a protest against and an acceptance of human mortality and the contradictions inherent in the human condition. Auden further contends that we feel ambivalent about our mortal...
In a century of the symbolist, surreal, and absurd, W. H. Auden is essentially a poet of the reasonable. "Coming out of me living is always thinking," a line from one of his early poems, is perceptive comment indeed by a poet whose difficult passages, while innovative in syntax and diction, usually yield a logical resolution. (p. 3) All readers of Auden note a change in his work after 1939, a change some critics interpret as a retreat from the liberal commitment of his poetry in the thirties. ...
The various characteristics that [Randall Jarrell in his essay "Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry," see CLC, Vol. 2] lists in order to describe the style of 1930—so many of them involving ellipsis: the omission of articles, demonstrative adjectives, subjects, conjunctions, relative pronouns, auxiliary verbs—form a language of extremity and urgency. Like telegraphese, with which it has sometimes been compared, it has time and patience only for the most impo...
[We should not be tempted] either to believe Auden's own analysis of his creative character, or to divide his output too firmly into the "English" Auden and the "International" one. Of course, his departure for good from England early in 1939 is a very real watershed, but the nature of the change it brought about in Auden's poetry defies simplistic description. I am inclined to follow Edward Lucie-Smith's view, that what Auden learned from America was not how...
The first of Auden's longer works, Paid on Both Sides: A Charade,… is ostensibly an episode in a continuing feud between two families who live some fifteen miles apart in the Lead Dales of the English north country…. (p. 287) Auden seems to have intended the charade as a vehicle for an ambitious allegory on the life and death instincts—a modern Morality of Eros and Thanatos—that could take its place beside Eliot's The Waste Land…. Paid on Both Sides is a vari...
The usual notion that the earliest Auden is apolitical, as voiced by Jarrell or Spender (e.g., in the famous remark that Auden "came to politics by way of psychology"), is true only in a very qualified sense: that is, by excluding his political poems from consideration…. The reason why Auden came to politics by way of psychology is that Auden's pre-1932 psychology contained a very powerful political element. It was a psychology that definitely preferred action to contemplation&#x...
Symbolisation of landscape is one of the major structural patterns in the poetry of W. H. Auden. Aware as he has ever been of the inadequacy of the direct statement for the purposes of poetic art, he has been in search of poetic devices that can fittingly incarnate the ideas about the major situations of the day as well as the universal truths of human psyche and life. Symbolisation of landscape is a method of turning the abstraction into a concrete form and thereby making them take on a new identity. The v...
Above all I was charmed in Auden by what to me, when I first read him, seemed the ultimate sophistication, which was not disillusion but instead minimal expectations. More exactly, it was the combination of unillusioned insight, antiromantic and scientifically objective, with the ability to believe in and feel, however mutedly, the traditional positives…. Such poems as "Lay your sleeping head, my love," seemed a fascinating poetry of deflated affirmation, in which the lover expects litt...
Auden came close to a point where he no longer understood his own poetry…. [Something] happened that made him close his mind, not to the earliest poetry so much as to that of the middle 'thirties. The Collected Poems … omits much and alters a good deal of what is retained. This supplementary volume [The English Auden], however, contains all the poetry of the specified period, the text being "in the form it reached at the end of 1939."… (p. 609) [The English Auden], ...
Ever the schoolboy poet, whose mixed blessing it was to have authored juvenilia of such intellectual force and genius of craft that the best of his last writings must inevitably seem a trifle anticlimactic, Auden never was deserted by his adolescent brilliance; and though this may seem something of a left-handed compliment, it was actually his precocious Oxford arsenal of cleverness, cheek, voracious erudition, and ambition … that enabled him to produce a body of work more various, prolific, and subs...
