Auden's Poetry Research Articles

A Tale of the Soldier and the Politics of Translation: W. H. Auden and Chinese Poets during World War II

Abstract This article studies soldiers as concrete images of heroes appearing in both W. H. Auden's wartime poetry and Chinese poetry in the 1940s from a cross-cultural perspective. Auden depicted images of soldiers in a grotesque and ironic manner that came to define Audenesque rhetoric. However, Chinese poets in the 1940s, such as Shao Xunmei and Mu Dan, for example, both translated Auden's poems with patriotic and positive undertones to reflect the sentiments of ordinary soldiers, and they even rewrote Auden's verses. They modified his original versions to flatter the taste of Auden's Chinese counterparts. Therefore, it is significant to examine the role of politics in poetry translation in the historical context of the 1940s. This research concerns not only the study of the political impact on comparative literature, but also, more importantly, it will map out ways in which public emotion might motivate or hinder the introduction of Western (or Non-Chinese) poetry through translation. In order to analyze the role of public opinion in the rewriting and translation of Auden's poetry, this article draws on several images of soldiers as examples of the overall discourse during wartime China.

Reading Auden as a Resource for Existential Reflection in a Society with Technocratic and Hedonistic Tendencies

The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of a remarkable writer, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 - 1973), who was strongly influenced by the philosophy and thinking of the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, especially by his works Either - Or, The Concept of Anxiety, Works of Love and The Sickness Unto Death. Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, purity and religion, and its unique variety in tone, form and content. It is enormously rich in allusions, poetic tone and intellectual power. The content of his poems ranges from philosophical meditations, the concept of being, the concept of man, anxiety, aloneness and despair, to the contemporary crises of modern man and the evolution of society. His poetry becomes a resource for existential reflection in modern society with the technocratic and hedonistic tendencies of consumer society of which this paper is an in-depth analysis.

Humanism and ideology

ABSTRACTCombining autobiographical and theoretical reflections, this essay looks back impressionistically on the last 100 years of British/US LGBTQ history. The discussion draws on exemplary texts from a range of media; these texts include Brokeback Mountain, Auden's poetry, Rattigan's drama, queer oral history, and gay journalism.

Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens by Erin G. Carlston (review)

Reviewed by: Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens by Erin G. Carlston Beth C. Rosenberg Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens. Erin G. Carlston. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 332. $89.50 (cloth); $29.50(paper). Erin G. Carlston's book is an interdisciplinary study of the Jews, homosexuals, and communists who were engaged in or suspected of espionage in twentieth-century France, England, and America. There is a refreshing sense of dimension to Carlston's version of modernism during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; her narrative about liminal citizens does not rely on stereotype or image hunting to reveal how "invisible Others" in the modern west are perceived as marginal to the nation. Instead, Double Agents creates rich historical and cultural contexts by juxtaposing close readings of Marcel Proust's novels, W. H. Auden's poetry, and Tony Kushner's play Angels in America against the Dreyfus affair in France, the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean from Great Britain, and the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case in the United States. The first chapter, "Citizens, Aliens, and Traitors," offers an overview of historical constructions of Jewishness and sexual deviance as "Other"; the Jew is the iconic figure who is potentially "incompatible with citizenship in the modern Western nation-state" (2). Carlston argues that Jewish emancipation during the nineteenth century epitomized the problems of defining citizenship. Though the ethos of liberalism that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century affirmed the rights of Jewish citizens, Jews were always considered un-assimilateable because of their religious and cultural differences. During this same time, this characterization of Jews as anomalous aliens was informed by scientific and pseudoscientific theories of race and by explicit associations of Jews with treason, particularly in the internationally popular Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Jews were associated with sexual deviancy, and like religious or cultural difference, sexual difference "threatened the liberal concept of the nation as a contract between publicly identical individuals" (33). The Jewish male and his masculinity were often associated with femininity, and therefore the (Jewish) men who were perceived as feminine became the focus of anxiety about the nation. One chain of associations has particular significance for Carlston's argument, the one that links together "the patriarchal family with national affiliation, describes Jews and homosexuals as interrelated threats to both familial and national integrity, and consequently assigns to both an overdetermined relationship to Communism" (40). Homosexual men were characterized as immature about their social and civic capacities because they shirked the duties of the bourgeois husband and father. Excluded from participation in family and nation, Jews and homosexuals were assumed to be without national loyalty; as both transgressed national borders, they were accused of favoring internationalist, left-wing political movements and of promoting the goals of social egalitarianism or of communism. It is in the second chapter, "The Dreyfus Affair," that the story of espionage really begins. Carlston writes that it was the affair that crystallized the anxieties of the French national consciousness, solidifying the conflict between Jews' "ideological status as aliens" and "their legal status as citizens" as well as the split between the "two Frances" of nationalists and liberal republicans (52). The chapter outlines the history of the secret dossier associated with the affair. Dreyfus was accused of writing the infamous bordereau, a note found in a German attaché's trash can that listed classified documents. Also found with the bordereau were salacious notes between the German officer and his male lover. Carlston's brilliant exegetical history of these texts shows how the discourses of sex and gender deviance were more encrypted, more subterranean than the discourses of Semitism (75). After the dossier completed its purpose of establishing a court-martial for Dreyfus, it continued to circulate among government and military personnel [End Page 789] and provided "a textual connection between the homosexual military attachés and the exiled Dreyfus" (77). We find in the Dreyfus Affair that "homosexual practices and effeminacy circulate alongside heterosexual promiscuity, a taste for sadomasochism, racial or religious deference and so on as nearly equivalent signifiers of unreliability" (77). The emphasis on textual analysis of the Dreyfus Affair continues...

“Turn Her Desperate Longing to Love”: W. H. Auden, Denis De Rougemont, and Lyric Love Poetry

It is widely acknowledged that W. H. Auden's poetry underwent significant during and after his return to Christianity in 1940, though both Edward Mendelson and Alan Jacobs have done much to explain exactly how changed after his conversion and to show that those were not as abrupt or drastic as earlier critics had supposed. both Mendelson and Jacobs reveal, many of Auden's post-conversion changes are traceable to his pre-conversion concerns, and Mendelson in particular traces the ways in which Auden's views on history and religion continued to develop in the thirty years following his return to the Anglican communion. But many critics are still sympathetic to Philip Larkin's famous complaint that the young, quasi-Marxist based his poetry on experience while the older, Christian based his poetry on books (125). statement is too broad to be accurate--Auden's poetry had always been based at least partly on books, whether his early readers realized it or not--but Larkin is right to imply inadvertently that a reader of Auden's poems benefits from knowing which books thought important when he wrote each poem. read several important books shortly before and during his return to Christianity, including Charles Williams' Descent of the Dove, Charles Norris Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture, Augustine's Confessions, and the works of Pascal and Kierkegaard (see Auden, Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose 2: 248; and Mendelson, Later 124-27), and the influence of several of these books on has been ably traced by Mendelson, John Fuller, and others. However, not even Mendelson has sufficiently explored Auden's heavy reliance on Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World in the lyric love poetry he wrote in the 1940s; and while Rougemont's influence on waned in the 1950s, Rougemont was in large part responsible for showing that the tension between erotic and altruistic loves might possibly be resolved. this article I wish to examine the ways in which used Rougemont's ideas about love in his poems and to explain why, after about 1950, largely stopped referring to Rougemont and wrote comparatively fewer love poems than he had written in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of Auden's best-known poems are love poems. From his first major poetic efforts in his 1928 verse play Paid on Both Sides, which involves a struggle between family loyalty and marital love, to his lyrics of the late 1930s such as Lullaby and As I Walked Out One Evening, to post-conversion poems like In Praise of Limestone and The Love Feast, Auden's poetry repeatedly returns to the conflicts between different kinds of love. His early poetry is often concerned with the troubled relationship between friendship and sex, and after his return to Christianity, the question of how God relates to them both vexes and energizes his poetry. From the beginning, did implicitly recognize a difference between the selfish love epitomized by sexual desire and the altruistic love epitomized in friendship between equals, and his poetry from the 1930s exhibits continual regret that the two forms of love never manage to coexist permanently. Monroe Spears plausibly argues that Auden's post-conversion views on love changed significantly in the 1940s, during which time shifts from this initial tendency to regard Eros and Agape as wholly distinct (in the manner of Kierkegaard, Barth, Nygren, and extreme Protestants in general) to the view that they are conjoinable in the Catholic concept of Caritas Divine Comedy of W. H. Auden 60). Spears had also claimed in an earlier work that The classic Protestant exposition of the radical distinction between Agape and Eros is Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros... the Roman Catholic position is that the two are united in Caritas.... Auden's attitude has always been Protestant in this respect (The Poetry of W. H. 164n). …

W. H. Auden's poetry: mythos, theory, and practice

W. H. Auden's poetry: mythos, theory, and practice

Contemporary Meaning of the Body in W. H. Auden's Poetry

Contemporary Meaning of the Body in W. H. Auden's Poetry

Auden's Call to Arms: 'Spain' and Psychoanalysis

W. H. Audenoccupied a central place in the consciousness of the British left in the 1930s not because he was a political poet in any ordinary sense but because he was a persuasive diagnostician of a diseased civilisation. There was also, of course, a touch of the prophet in the early Auden, hinting at hidden, unconscious forces beneath the surface of events. These forces could be either menacing or potentially liberating, and part of the appeal of Auden's early poetry was the process of self-exploration and self-diagnosis taking place in contact with larger, deeper energies and powers – the unconscious of an expanded territory. With the Spanish crisis of 1937, however, Auden's stance altered in an important way. He was no longer satisfied with waiting for a ‘change of heart’; it was time to assume responsibility and take personal action. But this decision could only be a first step. To manage such a transition as a poet, Auden would have to discover new resources of poetic form, take up a different stance towards his audience, and find the proper grounds of intellectual appeal for the new kind of argument he wished to make. And, since psychoanalysis had provided much of the intellectual underpinning, or we might even say the logic, of Auden's poetry, Auden would now have to adapt what was explicitly an anti-political mode of thought to political uses. His partial success is testimony to the poet's enormous ingenuity and talent, and to his intellectual seriousness, but also to the inherent moral and political limitations of psychoanalytic thinking.

The Romantic Matter of Fact

A shilling life will give all the facts. The note of knowing scorn in the opening line of Auden's sonnet Who's Who (Collected Poems 126) suggests, not that are wrong exactly, but that the only are ever likely to establish in the public realm (how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night) are bound to disappoint never bring you? very close to who's really who. But the poem is far from against per se, with the turn of the sonnet turns toward the kind of that, were knowable, would tell just what want to know. But these are private realities that the archives are never going to disclose: he sighed for one Who, say astonished critics, lived at home; Did little jobs about the house with skill And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still Or potter round the garden ... Those lines are poignantly invested with the rapt enchantment that domestic routine usually enjoys in Auden's poetry: here, life of unremarkable detail, far too dull to find place in the records, inaudibly subversive of the grander myths which normally order the lives of Great Men. Auden later paid sombre homage to Clio, of History, who bears witness to such exceptional yet unremarkable truths: Muse of the unique--Historical fact (Collected Poems 612); but the circumstantial charm of unique, riddling, inassimilable had long entranced his verse in much less august style. Well? As matter of the farm was in Pembrokeshire ... (English Auden 87) The feel of enters the poetry as an unmitigated non sequitur, at once comical weirdly off-putting--a piece of horrible photography, thought Empson, and I remember shuddering as I first set eyes on it (Empson 98). Auden's attachment to such uncompromising matters of fact, whether reverent or darkly amused, might feel like good example of his anti-Romanticism--or, to put that another way, good example of his modernism, sharing the principled suspicion of imagination its excesses that prompted Eliot, for example, to insist upon the proper primacy of a very highly developed sense of fact (Eliot, 31). (1) For one Romantic attitude toward is very well known, may even appear definitive. Facts--stubborn facts!--none of your Theory Coleridge once wrote in his notebook, A most entertaining & instructive Essay--the sooner the better (Notebooks iii.3737). Like many Coleridgean, projects the sooner done the better, that one was never, in fact, done; but many of the works that did get written instead communicate well enough his hostility, rejecting that reverence for the unmediated which (as Coleridge saw matters) had so corrupted modern intellectual life. To attempt to argue any great question upon only, is absurd, Coleridge was reported table-talking: you cannot state any before mixed audience, which an opponent as clever as yourself cannot with ease twist towards another bearing, or at least meet by contrary fact, as is called. I wonder why were ever called stubborn things... Facts, know, are not truths (Table Talk ii.154). The uneducated rustic, according to Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, is the sort of person who deals in insulated facts; the wise man is the one to whom facts are valuable ... chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling law, which is true being of things (Biographia ii.52; 53). Sceptical Hazlitt doubtless had Coleridge in mind when he diagnosed the shortcomings of poets outside the airy world of their lyrics: When they light upon the ground of prose matter-of-fact, they seem not to have the same use of their feet (Hazlitt xii.5). Coleridge was an idealist--an extreme Idealist, I.A. Richards once called him (Richards, Coleridge 19). And no idealist can easily afford to make too much of because of what feels to be their defining attribute--that which ensures their factuality: namely, the sheer, intransigent, unique givenness of them. …

Book Review: What Became of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry

Book Review: What Became of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry

What Became of Wystan? Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry

In this lucid and balanced treatise, Alan Jacobs reveals the true parameters of Auden's change after the poet's move to America in 1939. By carefully examining poems that represent transitional moments in Auden's thinking, Jacobs identifies the points at which the tectonic plates of the poet's intellect clashed and the buckles and rifts created in Auden's work. Surveying Auden's growth over time, Jacobs explores the idea of personal and moral change. Chapters outline Auden's rejection of Romanticism and his adoption of Horatianism, and his altered views of political, psychological, and sexual matters. Lastly Jacobs demonstrates the consistent qualities of thought and expression found throughout Auden's poetry and shows how, in great art as in great minds, change and continiuity may powerfully coexist.

Human Clay: Some People in Auden's Poetry, 1936-1941

Human Clay: Some People in Auden's Poetry, 1936-1941

The Crucifixion in Auden's Poetry

The Crucifixion in Auden's Poetry

The Case of the Helmeted Airman: A Study of W. H. Auden's Poetry.

The Case of the Helmeted Airman: A Study of W. H. Auden's Poetry.

Review Notices : The Case of the Helmeled Airman. A Study of W. H. Auden's Poetry. By François Duchêne. London: Chatto and Windus. 1972. 228 pp. £3.00

Review Notices : The Case of the Helmeled Airman. A Study of W. H. Auden's Poetry. By François Duchêne. London: Chatto and Windus. 1972. 228 pp. £3.00

The Case of the Helmeted Airman. A Study of W. H. Auden's Poetry

The Case of the Helmeted Airman. A Study of W. H. Auden's Poetry

A Map of Modern English Verse; Commitment to Poetry; Auden's Poetry; Quest for the Necessary: W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness

A Map of Modern English Verse; Commitment to Poetry; Auden's Poetry; Quest for the Necessary: W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness

Auden's Poetry.

Auden's Poetry.

The Humanization of Auden's Early Style

The widespread feeling that Auden's poetic powers have declined steadily since the thirties, which is epitomized in an essay like Randall Jarrell's “Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry,” is based on a misunderstanding of both his intellectual and stylistic evolution. By taking adequate account of the important stylistic shift which moved Auden away from his early Anglo-Saxon and Hopkinsesque addictions and made it possible for him to express a more straightforward and centrally human concern in the poetry of his middle period, we can appraise his achievement more accurately. This crucial and beneficial shift, which owes something to Yeats, begins in Look, Stranger! (1936) and is characterized by Auden's new willingness to face the dangers and failures of the period directly in lucid, reflective, fully syntactic speech. The full-throated, implicated, moving human voice which emerges here, concerned not with extravagance or exaggeration but with facing the truth and accounting for it, is largely responsible for Auden's preeminence among English poets born in this century.

Auden's Marxism

Commentators have mentioned Auden's Marxism for so long now that his indebtedness to Marx threatens to become a critical commonplace through sheer repetition. Yet no one has ever shown that such indebtedness exists. In the 1930's merely to be young, socially conscious, and outspoken was enough to mark one as a Marxist, or at least a “leftist,” and Auden was all these things. But now that the 1930's have passed, and Auden has long since ceased to be either young or a “thirties poet,” the Marxist element in his work deserves a thorough investigation. I propose, therefore, to ask how much Marxism there is in Auden's poetry, where it is found, and what sort of thing it is. Since it is important to discover just how the pattern of his Marxist borrowings changes (if it does) through the years, the first question calls for a chronological examination of his work.