W.H.Auden Poems

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After completing the unit on W.H.Auden's poem our prof.Dr Dilip Barad Sir gave us a task as our thinking activity in classroom. So in this Blog I would like to talk about W.H.Auden's poems. 

So firstly throw some light on W.H.Auden:-

WH Auden said “poetry must be entered into by a personal encounter, or it must be left alone”. His poems have been personal for me for 30 years; they’re a touchstone I use now and then to take the measure of my world. There’s just something about him: the stars he sees align with mine.

Wystan Hugh Auden, the British poet, moved to the United States in 1939. He taught at the University of Michigan and Swarthmore College during World War II. After the war he went to Germany with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey to help assess the effect of the Allied bombing campaign. He returned to the United States, settled in Manhattan and became an American citizen.

Pulitzer Prize juries considered poetry collections by Auden in 1945 and 1948. In each case, his book had competition.

English poet, playwright, critic, and librettist Wystan Hugh Auden exerted a major influence on the poetry of the 20th century. Auden grew up in Birmingham, England and was known for his extraordinary intellect and wit. His first book, Poems, was published in 1930 with the help of T.S. Eliot. Just before World War II broke out, Auden emigrated to the United States where he met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lifelong lover. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for The Age of Anxiety. Much of his poetry is concerned with moral issues and evidences a strong political, social, and psychological context. While the teachings of Marx and Freud weighed heavily in his early work, they later gave way to religious and spiritual influences.b

Here are my responses on the 3 questions:-

1)Which lines of poem 'September 1,1939'you liked the most? Why?

Original poem:-

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism's face

And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow;

"I will be true to the wife,

I'll concentrate more on my work,"

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the deaf,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like theme

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

September 1, 1939" opens by establishing its setting. The poem's title alludes to a major event: the Nazi German invasion of Poland, which is now remembered as a tipping point in the outbreak of World War II. The first two lines, however, indicate that the poem's physical location is many miles away from the invasion.

 I liked this line:-

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

 Why?:- I liked this line because In it poet describes things as living things.the poet describes the nature of the task his poetic voice has to perform in America. He says that he possesses only his poetic voice, and no other power, to undo the evil beliefs prevalent in America and elsewhere. The first evil is the conservative ignorance of the religious-minded. Then there is the fictitious lie of individualism. Its doctrine declares that nothing exists but the individual self. This doctrine rules over the mind of the materialistic man-in-the-street. The third evil theory is the lie of authoritarianis. Auden mentioned evils ruling over the minds of the people. And he has to contradict them by means of his poetic power.

2)What is so special about in 'Memory of W.B. Yeats?

In Memory of W. B. Yeats' by W. H. Auden (1907-73) was written in 1939, following the death of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in January of that year. As well as being an elegy for the dead poet, 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats' is also a meditation on the role and place of poetry in the modern world.if we throw some light on poem that it Written in 1940, it commemorates the death of the poet in 1939, a critical year for Auden personally as well as for the world at large. This was the year he moved to New York and the year the world catapulted itself into the Second World War. Yeats was born in Ireland 1856 and embraced poetry very early in his life.

If we try to see that what is special in this that this Poems about death tend to be concerned not just with loss, but also with what remains after a man or a woman dies. rather than in relation to an actual death: the lover promises his beloved that even though she must die, she will live.

 One of the reasons the poem is not just a technically accomplished but also a semantically profound poem is the tension between these differing views of what poetry is and should be. It also marks Auden out as a modern poet, aware that a complex world – and a complex thing like artistic influence and poetic function – cannot be reduced to simple slogans or maxims.

a powerful poem not just about Yeats but about all poets whose work can teach us ‘how to praise’. These final words of Auden’s poem are, fittingly enough, inscribed on the poet’s own memorial stone in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Auden's poem draws on all these traditions as it focuses just on that moment when the words of a poet must begin to live on after his death. The poem which Auden writes is the first step in preserving Yeats the poet. But most important, Auden understands this process of poetic after-life as taking place entirely within history.

3) is there any contemporary relevance of 'Epitaph on Tyrant'?

In this poem poet deals with the thoughts and actions of a tyrant. Typically, a tyrant abuses his power and position of authority. Tyrants like to be in complete control and tend to quash, in a harsh way, any opposition to their policies and programs. In essence, W. H. Auden, in a subtle, understated way is discussing what happens in a society when a tyrant rules a nation.

We find that out national leaders also do like Tyrant. Yes it's democracy but they all used to one thing that citizens of the nation to understand - it is his way or the highway. People often acquiesce when their lives and livelihoods are threatened. Therefore, the tyrant manipulates and controls people by having strict punishment always. They don't have any particular reason to become kind toward the citizens but for money and Political positions they show off more on social media. We see that our leaders's dictatorship and played no small role in shaping the world as we know it today and they had known it then.

They all do dictatorship but nothing to come out to shape the world.

Thank you...