Name::- Sneha Agravat
Batch:- 2020-22 (MA sem 2)
Paper 7:- The 20th century Literature from world war 2 to the end of the century
Topic name:- Short analysis of W.H.Auden's poems
Roll no.:-16
Enrollment no.:-3069206420200001
E-mail Id :- snehaagravat2000@gmail.com
Submitted to:- S.B.Gardi Department Of English Maharaja krishnkumarsinhji Bhavngar University
Introduction:-
WH Auden said “poetry must be entered into by a personal encounter, or it must be left alone”.The English-born American poet W. H. Auden was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His works center on moral issues and show strong political, social, and psychological (involving the study of the mind) orientations.Auden's early poetry, influenced by his interest in the Anglo-Saxon language as well as in psychoanalysis, was sometimes riddle-like and clinical. It also contained private references that most readers did not understand. At the same time it had a mystery that would disappear in his later poetry.
W.H.Auden:-
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.
We learnt three famous poems in our syllebus:-
Short analysis of his 3 poems:-
1) Epitaph on a Tyrant
2) sep 1,1939
3) In memory of W.B.Yeats
1) Epitaph on a Tyrant:-
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Epitaph on a Tyrant’ is one of Auden’s short masterpieces. In just six lines, W. H. Auden (1907-73) manages to say so much about the nature of tyranny. You can read ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ here, before proceeding to our short analysis of this powerful poem that remains all too relevant today. We’re going to go through the poem line by line and combine our summary of ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ with a close textual analysis of it, since every line yields new observations and questions.
W. H. Auden spent some time in Berlin during the 1930s, and it was here that he probably wrote ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’, which was published in 1939, the year that the Second World War broke out. The specific tyrant Auden had in mind, then, was probably Adolf Hitler, though the poem can be analysed as a study in tyranny more generally, too.
We start with the word ‘Perfection’, which is immediately undermined by the qualifying clause ‘of a kind’. Something is either perfect or it is not; there is no such thing as perfection ‘of a kind’. This shows the unrealistic nature of the tyrant’s dream, which often stems from a desire to create some kind of utopia. The poetry the tyrant wrote, we are told, was easy to understand.But Auden is also inverting a specific phrase by the nineteenth-century writer John Lothrop Motley, in The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1859), citing a report of 1584 about the death of the Dutch ruler William the Silent: ‘As long as he lived, he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.’
It’s not necessary to get this (very precise) allusion, of course, but inverting that last line (we can more readily imagine a chain of cause-and-effect whereby the death of a ruler caused the children to cry, than we can imagine crying bringing about the death of children) does help to bring into sharper focus the contrast Auden is making between a kindly ruler and an evil tyrant.
The last line of the poem indicates that when the tyrant makes forceful, and probably illogical and even insane decisions, the populace, including children, suffers horribly. The tyrant's cry is his or her tortured mind, which leads to the tyrant taking action that hurts others.
2) sep 1,1939:-
W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" was first published in the October 18, 1939, edition of The New Republic, before being included in the poet's collection Another Time. Written upon the outbreak of World War II, the poem captures feelings of fear and uncertainty in the face of fascism and war—as well as glimmers of hope that people might come together to counter authoritarianism. It is one of Auden's most well-known poems, and widely considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century; ironically, however, the poet himself grew to despise it. Despite his disavowal of the poem, "September 1, 1939" remains a text to which people turn in times of crisis, including, famously, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.
September 1, 1939” Summary:-
I'm sitting in one of the cheap dive bars on 52nd Street in New York City feeling uncertain and afraid, as my hopes of a better time fade in the face of this decade's true nature: degraded and untruthful. Rushes of anger and fear are sweeping across countries all around the world and consuming the inner thoughts of everyday people. The terrible implication of death and war hangs over this September night like a bad smell.
History and scholarship can help explain the origins of this horror to the 15th century with Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation—which has right up until today twisted and rotted Germany's entire culture. Look to what happened at Linz (i.e., the birth of Adolf Hitler) and how his youthful influences made him into a psychopathic, power-hungry dictator. For I and everybody else knows what all children learn at school: people who are harmed and bullied harm and bully others in return.
The exiled Greek general Thucydides understood what rhetoric can reveal about the state of democracy, and about what dictators are like—all the garbage they spew until their indifferent deaths. Thucydides analyzed it all in his book—how dictatorships edge out knowledge and reason, how the societies that dictators rule over become used to suffering, how poor governance and sorrow leave their mark. And now we must suffer all those same societal ills all over again.
Here, in this supposedly neutral country, the towering skyscrapers use all their might to present a facade of unity and democracy, but this high-minded rhetoric is just a cover-up. How long can people live under this pretense of a beautiful but false ideal? Eventually they look at themselves in the mirror and see their government's actions—imperialism and war—staring right back at them.
Other people sitting at the bar would rather hold on tight to the normality of their everyday lives—for the lights to stay on, the music to keep playing, as though nothing's wrong. All around us, the conventions of daily life work together to make this fortress we're living in feel like a home, preventing us from seeing where we really are—lost in haunted forest—and who we really are—vulnerable people afraid of the world's evils, who are neither as happy nor as innocent as we'd like to believe.
The meaningless propaganda championed by so-called Important People is not nearly as indecent as our own desires. What the ballet dancer Nijinsky wrote about his lover Diaghilev is true for everyone. The fundamental human flaw is that we all want what we cannot have: love for ourselves and ourselves only, rather than universal love that benefits everyone.
Out of the repressed muddle of their feelings and into moral life come everyday people, repeating their daily promises as they head off to work in the morning: "I will not cheat on my wife. I will apply myself harder at work." And above them, the so-called people in charge continue playing at governance, as their roles dictate they must. Who can free all these people? Who can be heard by those who don't want to listen, or speak on behalf on those who won't express themselves?
The only thing I have to offer is my own voice, but with that voice I can pierce through the lie embedded in society—the alluring lie that everyday people have absorbed, the lie that the government holds all the power. The truth is that "the State" as people think of it doesn't exist, and that none of us are powerless individuals. Don't all of us—citizens and authorities—experience hunger the same way? We must care for one another, or die divided.
Helplessly ignorant, most of our world sits in a vulnerable daze. Even so, all around, pinpricks of unexpected hope shine wherever those committed to justice connect with one another. Oh, may I, though I am just another human made of desire and dust, and stricken by the same cynicism and worry, do the same, and support their hope with my own voice.
Themes of the poem:-
State Authority vs. Individual Responsibility:-
Throughout “September 1, 1939” the speaker denounces the fascism taking hold abroad, which “darken[s] the lands of the earth” and has “the unmentionable odour of death.”
Love, Connection, and Justice:-
In the poem's most famous line, the speaker declares, “We must love one another or die.” The speaker consistently argues for the benefits of human connection, rejecting the all-too-human impulse to desire “not universal love / but to be loved alone.” It’s far better for society, the speaker argues, for people to acknowledge that “no one exists alone,” and with that knowledge, to connect with others who are “Just.”
The Repetition of History:-
Though “September 1, 1939” was inspired by and takes place during the events of 1939, it explicitly connects that moment to others from the past. Citing the ancient Greek philosopher Thucydides, the speaker draws parallels between the rise of fascism in the 20th century and similar antidemocratic forces throughout history.
3) In memory of W.B.Yeats:-
In ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ Auden taps into themes of life after death, the power of poetry, and the human condition. The powerful and wide-ranging themes are discussed within the context of Yeats’ life and death. Auden uses an exacting tone and direct language to depict the events around Yeat’s death. The mood is at times uplifting and at others concerning and worrying. There are many dark images and many fewer hopeful ones.
Summary:-
The first part of the poem addresses the last days of Yeats’ life and what it was like right after he died. Auden speaks on the loss and how it impacted and didn’t impact, the world. The second section of ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ is directed, through a second person speaker, to Yeats himself. While the third is an elegy meant to sum up that which was spoken about previously but also make new statements about what poetry can do for humankind, especially in the face of WWII.
Structure of the poem:-
In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ by W. H. Auden is a three-part poem that is further divided into stanzas of different lengths. The first part of the poem contains six stanzas, the second: one and the third: six again. Auden does not make use of a rhyme scheme in the first two parts of the poem but in the third he does. This makes sense considering the elegiac form of these last lines. They rhyme in a pattern of AABB CCDD, and so on, changing end sounds as he saw fit.
Auden had a different goal in mind with each section. The first images what it was like when Yeats was dying, the second is addressed to the poet himself, and the third is a much more traditional elegy.
Poetic Techniques in poem:-
Auden makes use of several poetic techniques in ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’. These include enjambment, allusion, and alliteration. An allusion is an expression that’s meant to call something specific to mind without directly stating it. In the second part of the poem, Auden alludes to some of Yeats’ other works, especially those focused on the Irish Independence Movement and the Irish Nationalists at the heart of it. The final section alludes to the tragedies of the Second World War that was brewing in 1939 when Yeats died.
Another important technique commonly used in poetry is enjambment. It occurs when a line is cut off before its natural stopping point. Enjambment forces a reader down to the next line, and the next, quickly. One has to move forward in order to comfortably resolve a phrase or sentence. For example, the transition between lines three and four in the first stanza of section three or that between lines one and two of stanza three of that same section.
Conclusion:-
In nutshell we can say that W.H. Auden is definitely a modernist poet, and a quick glance at his days at Oxford confirm his modernist proclivities from the earliest days of his mature writing career. Both thematically and structurally, Auden's poems show the very essence of modernism. The characteristics that are needed to consider him as a modern poet are all in profusely blended in his poems. ... Auden is also modern in this respect. He has experimented with free verse, blank verse, the ballad metre etc.
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