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A Way of Happening: Auden’s American Presence

Aidan Wasley

in The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene

This chapter argues that Auden's extensive and largely unexplored impact on the post-war generation of American poets helped not only to define the terms by which these younger poets framed their own ... More

This chapter argues that Auden's extensive and largely unexplored impact on the post-war generation of American poets helped not only to define the terms by which these younger poets framed their own work and careers, but also offered a new and influential model for understanding what it meant to write poetry in America after World War II and after Modernism. In particular, Auden's redefinition of his own poetic identity following his emigration from England helped to shape American poetry in terms of what Auden called “the burden of choice”: How to select an inheritance from the myriad possibilities opened up in the wake of Modernism's shattering of notions of a unified native tradition. By framing his post-1939 poetry as “a way of happening,” Auden inaugurated a poetic vision of post-Modernist America as an open, inclusive text defined not in terms of shared ideals of national, ideological, or historical inheritance, but by the freedom, and necessity, to choose among the kaleidoscopic range of formal, cultural, or transnational poetic identities made available by the collapse of those earlier ideals.Less

He Became His Admirers: Saying Goodbye to Auden

Aidan Wasley

in The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene

Auden's death on September 29, 1973 prompted an enormous range of poetic responses from younger American poets, many of them following Auden's example as Auden had followed Yeats, both in using the ... More

Auden's death on September 29, 1973 prompted an enormous range of poetic responses from younger American poets, many of them following Auden's example as Auden had followed Yeats, both in using the poet's own language in their memorials for him and in turning the moment, and their readings of the meaning of Auden's life and work, toward their own individual artistic arguments and purposes. Indeed, no twentieth-century poet has spawned as many elegies, eulogies, and remembrances from as wide a range of practicing poets as Auden. This chapter surveys a few of these poetic farewells to Auden, from across a broad spectrum of American verse, which provide a compelling testimonial to, and concluding perspective on, his impact on an entire generation—and beyond—of American poetry. These include the work of James Schuyler, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Louis Simpson, Irving Feldman, and Derek Walcott.Less

Auden in “Atlantis”

Aidan Wasley

in The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene

This chapter first details W. H. Auden's arrival in New York in January 1939. His emigration from England, and his arrival in America marked a crucial moment in twentieth-century literary history, ... More

This chapter first details W. H. Auden's arrival in New York in January 1939. His emigration from England, and his arrival in America marked a crucial moment in twentieth-century literary history, when the heir apparent to T. S. Eliot as the dominant presence in British poetry abandoned his English career and retraced Eliot's own path back across the Atlantic to start anew. The impact of that moment, and Auden's subsequent American career, are still being felt in American poetry seven decades later. The chapter then discusses his poem “Atlantis,” where he invokes the myth of the lost utopia, to illustrate what he calls “a poetic vision” of art's capacity for moral instruction, even as it recognizes its limitations.Less

Father of Forms: Merrill, Auden, and a Fable of Influence

Aidan Wasley

in The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene

This chapter discusses Auden's influence on James Merrill. It suggests that Merrill looked to Auden as the guide who could instruct him and encourage him to enjoy the feast of the full range of ... More

This chapter discusses Auden's influence on James Merrill. It suggests that Merrill looked to Auden as the guide who could instruct him and encourage him to enjoy the feast of the full range of poetic modes. Merrill would later begin that instruction, starting work on a new project that would aim to unite craft and sentiment, aesthetics and engagement, and whose vast ambition would more than encompass “what it all means, and what his neighbor feels.” That project was The Changing Light at Sandover, the poem that would rewrite Merrill's identity as a poet of epic scope and vision. The schoolmaster in Sandover's classroom and a central figure in the composition and narrative of the poem, was Auden.Less

The Old Sources: Rich, Auden, and Making Something Happen

Aidan Wasley

in The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene

This chapter discusses Auden's influence on Adrienne Rich. It argues that from her early emulation through her mature repudiation of his example, Auden's place in Rich's work and thought has ... More

This chapter discusses Auden's influence on Adrienne Rich. It argues that from her early emulation through her mature repudiation of his example, Auden's place in Rich's work and thought has persisted. As both an individual influence and as a representative of an entire range of poetic concerns which she has inherited and adapted, Auden comes to stand for poetic tradition itself—the tradition that gave her birth, and through and against which she has striven to define herself. For Rich, Auden sets the poetic terms—not always positively—out of which she constructs her own poetic identity. Like poetry itself, the figure of Auden and what he represents have been, throughout her career, ineluctable.Less

Auden Unparadized: Chatterton Lecture on Poetry

SEAMUS PERRY

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 162, 2008 Lectures

This lecture presents the text of the speech about English poet W.H. Auden delivered by the author at the 2008 Chatterton Lecture on Poetry held at the British Academy. It discusses criticism on ... More

This lecture presents the text of the speech about English poet W.H. Auden delivered by the author at the 2008 Chatterton Lecture on Poetry held at the British Academy. It discusses criticism on Auden as a poet who somehow lived beyond the early moment of his greatest and most amazing genius, and as one whose latest effort represented nothing less than the decline and fall of modernist poetry. The lecture also provides a critical analysis of some of Auden's most notable works.Less

The Lost Youth of Modern Poetry: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden

David Rosen

in Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry

This chapter studies the works of T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. It first looks at Auden's work “The Watershed” and its implications for the fate of plain English in the twentieth century. This chapter ... More

This chapter studies the works of T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. It first looks at Auden's work “The Watershed” and its implications for the fate of plain English in the twentieth century. This chapter is thus an account of the first generation of modern poets. It attempts to establish the connection between the Romantics to the emergence of these modern poets, and how the low register played in to the passage of time and evolution of language. The low register had in it a twofold legacy: on the one hand it had a reputation for honesty and a sense of accuracy in portraying the real world; on the other hand, it was an elevated idiom, an expression of the mind's active role in reflecting on and shaping reality—or what Coleridge called the lingua communis. This chapter thus looks at the career and work of Eliot and Auden in an attempt to uncover what their legacies have contributed to the low register of English.Less

W. H. Auden's Journeys to War

Tim Kendall

in Modern English War Poetry

This chapter explores the war poetry of W. H. Auden. Much of Auden's poetry of the late 1930s is defined by journeys to and from war. Although his decision to stay in New York after the outbreak of ... More

This chapter explores the war poetry of W. H. Auden. Much of Auden's poetry of the late 1930s is defined by journeys to and from war. Although his decision to stay in New York after the outbreak of the Second World War attracted imputations of cowardice and betrayal, until then Auden had actively sought war zones. Each of Auden's wars (including the Great War, which ended when he was 11) profoundly affected his poetry. But his treatment of them eschews specifics: the world, Auden argued in 1939, ‘has no localized events’, and all people ‘In all their living are profoundly implicated’.Less

Latemodernism’s Geopolitical Imagination: Everyday Life in the Global Hot Zones

Thomas S. Davis

in The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

This chapter turns to travel narratives from global hot zones where the examination of everyday life reveals the emergence of a new form of warfare shifting the balance of power in Europe and Asia.

The Gay Apprentice: Ashbery, Auden, and a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Critic

Aidan Wasley

in The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene

This chapter discusses Auden's influence on John Ashbery. By looking at the development of Ashbery's career through the prism of his early apprenticeship to Auden, and by taking Ashbery's claims ... More

This chapter discusses Auden's influence on John Ashbery. By looking at the development of Ashbery's career through the prism of his early apprenticeship to Auden, and by taking Ashbery's claims about his own poetics seriously, it challenges some familiar critical presumptions about Ashbery, prompted by a few basic questions: What are we to make of the disparity between how Ashbery sees himself and how he is seen? What is the responsibility of critics toward authorial claims of self-knowledge and intention? Is there something to be learned by listening to this poet and his poems, rather than reading through or against them? What does it mean to read Ashbery as a self-conscious inheritor of Auden's civic tradition, rather than heir to the various Romantic traditions with which he is customarily linked? In the end, the goal is less to reject prior understandings of Ashbery than to augment and complicate them, and suggest that in doing so, we discover a poet who is even richer—both more familiar and more strange, more conventional and more radical—than we may have seen.Less

Vernacular Discourse from Major to Minor

Matthew Hart

in Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing

The chapter begins by questioning Philip Larkin's argument that W. H. Auden's early poems are “successful” because they assert a relationship of identity among dialect, audience, and social theme. ... More

The chapter begins by questioning Philip Larkin's argument that W. H. Auden's early poems are “successful” because they assert a relationship of identity among dialect, audience, and social theme. Identifying this as a “major” discourse of the vernacular, the chapter uses the work of Jean Bodin and Giorgio Agamben to explore the importance of “major” vernacular discourse to the hegemonic function of nation‐states. The chapter then identifies “synthetic vernacular” poetry as verse that reworks “minor” vernacular discourses, thereby opening a gap within the homology among languages, peoples, and states. The chapter finally illustrates the limits of the synthetic vernacular concept via Ezra Pound's translation of Sophocles' Women of Trachis (1957).Less

The Rake, The Don, The Flute: W. H. Auden as Librettist (1982)

Willard Spiegelman

in Imaginative Transcripts: Selected Literary Essays

This chapter criticizes Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden's translation of the opera The Rake's Progress, Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni. It suggests that Auden's translation of the opera has given the ... More

This chapter criticizes Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden's translation of the opera The Rake's Progress, Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni. It suggests that Auden's translation of the opera has given the lie to his earlier pronouncements that the verses which the librettist writes are not addressed to the public but are really a private letter to the composer and that in opera the orchestra is addressed to the singers not to the audience. It contends that The Rake's Progress has overcome the label of being merely an exercise in imitation because its music, especially music wedded to words, offered a chance for something different.Less

W. H. Auden in an Age of Dark Oratory

Rachel Galvin

in News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945

This chapter charts how Auden’s strategies for writing about war as a civilian changed during World War II, extending the previous chapter’s inquiry regarding the journalistic aspirations of his ... More

This chapter charts how Auden’s strategies for writing about war as a civilian changed during World War II, extending the previous chapter’s inquiry regarding the journalistic aspirations of his 1930s writing and his vision of the transformation of bodily experience into text. It contends that the poems of Another Time offer parables of wartime interrelation: models for imagining the relation between contemplation and action, civilian and soldier. Further, whereas The Double Man has been read as superannuated and excessively rhetorical, this chapter argues that it shrewdly showcases the resources of poetic language available to the noncombatant. A concluding section examines a surprising episode in 1945 when Auden donned a military uniform for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and finally got the bird’s eye view of war he had imagined.Less

W. H. Auden: Rushing to the Pumps, or Not, in Spain and China

Rachel Galvin

in News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945

This chapter argues that W. H. Auden developed meta-rhetoric in response to his guilt about being too young to fight in World War I and to his reservations concerning the ethics of making verse out ... More

This chapter argues that W. H. Auden developed meta-rhetoric in response to his guilt about being too young to fight in World War I and to his reservations concerning the ethics of making verse out of other people’s bodily experience. After demonstrating that Auden’s Spanish Civil War poetry and prose was shaped by his critique of how the press mediates and represents war, the chapter examines his mock reportage of the Sino–Japanese War, contending that ethically motivated self-scrutiny drives Auden’s use of rhetoric during this period and is an unmistakable hallmark of his wartime poetry.Less

W. H. Auden and the Inklings

Michael Piret

in C. S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society

Although one of W. H. Auden’s last poems formally records his indebtedness to ‘Williams and Lewis’ for guiding him back to Christianity, his affinities with the Inklings are easily overlooked. He and ... More

Although one of W. H. Auden’s last poems formally records his indebtedness to ‘Williams and Lewis’ for guiding him back to Christianity, his affinities with the Inklings are easily overlooked. He and Lewis were kindred spirits in several ways, including their liturgical conservatism, their shared affirmation of a moral law which all acknowledge and none obey, their belief in the relevance of traditional doctrine to the modern predicament, and in their great appreciation for the writings of George MacDonald, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Auden’s enthusiastic reception of The Lord of the Rings, hardly the norm among 1950s literati, welcomed the books as a signal achievement in the Quest genre. While Tolkien rejected Auden’s characterization of the tale as a representation of subjective experience, he was nonetheless grateful for his support, and Auden’s distinctly personal approach shows how resonant the books were for him, as a man and as a poet.Less

Jazzing Britain: The Transatlantic Jazz Invasion and the Remaking of Englishness

Genevieve Abravanel

in Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire

When jazz arrived in England, the nation was on an imaginative precipice: both grasping after history and attempting to bury it, haunted by terrible loss and eager to forget it in a frenzy of music ... More

When jazz arrived in England, the nation was on an imaginative precipice: both grasping after history and attempting to bury it, haunted by terrible loss and eager to forget it in a frenzy of music and dance. As the contest over the jazz invasion raged in English newspapers and periodicals, in drawing rooms and public houses, the debate turned jazz into a metaphor for the modernization of England. This chapter demonstrates how a range of writers across the political spectrum, from Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf to Wyndham Lewis and W.H. Auden, each quite differently mobilized this metaphor. While it may seem surprising for writers to turn to American jazz music to explore the interwar crisis of Englishness, it was precisely because jazz invoked so many competing discourses—art and entertainment, whiteness and blackness, England and America—that it served this end so well.Less