DOCSLIB.ORG

Hass, Andrew Wilfred (1996) Poetics and the Philosophy of Reflection: with Particular Attention to W.H. Auden's the Sea And

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Hass, Andrew Wilfred (1996) Poetics and the Philosophy of Reflection: with Particular Attention to W.H. Auden's the Sea And Hass, Andrew Wilfred (1996) Poetics and the philosophy of reflection: with particular attention to W.H. Auden's The sea and the mirror as it reflects back to its predecessors and forward to postmodernism. PhD thesis http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3530/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] POETICS AND THE PlllLOSOPHY OF REFLECTION: With Particular Attention to W.K Auden's The Sea and the Mirror as It Reflects Back to Its Predecessors and Fonvard to Postmodernism by Andrew Wilfred Hass A thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D Centre for the Study of Literature and Theology Faculty of Divinity University of Glasgow May 1996 © Andrew W. Hass STATEMENT OF COPYRIGHT The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent, and information from it should be acknowledged. I I Abstract This thesis examines how a poetics may emerge from both the possibilities and the limits peculiar to the metaphor of the mirror and the concept of reflection. Working from a particular history of Western ideas that moves from Plato through to postmodernism, the examination focuses on W.H. Auden, whose treatment and utilization of reflection within The Sea and the Mirror, a long and variegated poem and commentary upon Shakespeare's late play The Tempest, act as a template for an expanded notion of poetics. It is argued that this poetics affirms the creative process by a breaking down of the borders between reflection and what is being reflected, thereby necessitating a reinscribing of those borders self-reflexively and ironically, and in tum necessitating a reevaluation of the respective tasks and boundaries of philosopher, artist and theologian. As suggested by Auden and The Sea and the Mirror, this poetics draws upon texts from a variety of historical periods and a variety of theoretical disciplines. The texts investigated in this thesis include: the "text" of a certain history of ideas defmed as the philosophy of reflection; Shakespeare's The Tempest; Robert Browning's Caliban Upon Setebos; Auden's later poem Friday's Child as well as many of his critical writings; and the theoretical notions and theologies of such contemporary thinkers as Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida as they themselves interact with the texts of the Bible, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and many other thinkers who have been critical of the West's metaphysical and onto-theological traditions. The bringing together of such texts is meant to show that, upon a continual reinvention of previous texts, the distinctions between an original and a copy, a poem and a commentary, or imaginative and theoretical discourse, begin to blur, and that the resulting negations and recreations, as variously represented by the figure of the "0", mark out a new inclusive arena for philosophy, art and theology. It is argued that this circular arena or stage does not, however, preclude the possibility of a "Wholly Other", but that, in line with the traditlolJ;,~~~5lIive theology, any theology seeking an non-idolatrous notion of GOd'"fWil1:.IJtq;lnd upon a doctrine of creation l~ ~ .... -'. as suggested by Auden, where reverential silence is reached through the ironies and inversions of conscious artifice as a "rite". In this sense, it is thus suggested that any philosophy or art probing the paradoxes and fissures of its own mirror­ like creations necessarily opens up new theological possibilities. Table of Contents Preface 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 1 33 Chapter 2 89 Chapter 3 117 Chapter 4 178 Chapter 5 198 Conclusion 232 Bibliography 238 1 Preface A thesis such as this, which purposely sets out to cross boundaries and disciplines, requires not only a certain approach to its composition, but also a certain approach to its reading. A thesis, as its etymology suggests, ought to propose and to place a particular argument. But when the particular argument itself questions the very notion of proposition and placement, at least in the accustomed understanding of these terms within academia, the resulting displacements can make reading a difficult, if not a disorienting, task. Of course, in a curious self-referentiality, this thesis will somehow have to account for its strangeness and departure from the norm, will have to justify its border-crossing, and it is the intention and the attempt of the following argument, by the time it has run its modest course, to have offered just such a justification for its unconventional modus operandi. But the reading of it will nevertheless demand a certain willingness to allow various critical approaches not simply to overlap their fields but in doing so to redefme or reconstitute those fields, so that, for example, the field of philosophy and the logic of discursive reasoning would become redefmed or reconstituted by the field of poetry and the methods of poetic analysis, and vice versa. This is to say, that by crossing such disciplines i. as philosophy, poetry and theology, one necessarily requires a new strategy to follow, as it were, the line of argument, a line reconstituted enough that, indeed, linearity may no longer be the best term for its description. And an alternative model is offered in the course of this argument, a circular model, whose procedure, if followed, would alter the entire concept of circumlocution or the "circular argument". But whatever the model, the reader will see, it is hoped, that the required or resulting new strategy is, in the end, precisely what is being argued for in the term poetics. As the unwieldy title of the thesis tries to show, the argument brings together the notions of poetics and postmodernism within the contexts of a particular philosophical discourse and history, reflection, and a particular poet and his poetry, W.H. Auden and chiefly, but not restricted to, The Sea and the 11 Mirror. The two outside tenns, "poetics" and "postmodemism", the two which have most compelled the writing of this thesis, are the more amorphous of the tenns, for there is little consensus as to exactly where their boundaries should lie: is "poetics" a category, a method, or a theory?; is "postmodernism" an academic theory, a cultural condition, or a historical label? There is of course no shortage of published material claiming to offer definitions for these tenns, particularly in recent times. One salient and important example is Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism, which deals extensively with contemporary texts of fiction and their common strategy of problematizing "historical knowledge, subjectivity, narrativity, reference, textuality, [and] discursive content". 1 Although this present thesis owes much to works like Hutcheon's, as they have laid significant groundwork for approaching the broad and sometimes intimidating topics both of "poetics" and of "postmodernism", it shares very different aims. Hutcheon for example, working largely within literary criticism, seeks to offer a description of both postmodem theory and postmodem practice, a description which very much conflates "theory" and "practice".2 While this thesis too admits a conflation of "theory" and "practice", it also attempts a conflation of "description" and "prescription", so that though it argues within a certain time line and for a certain history of ideas both of which have contributed to "the way things are now", it also attempts to enact, or at very least to suggest possibilities for, a new mode of operating. In this sense, the thesis is as much philosophy and as much theology, the two disciplines or discourses within the humanities which have most legitimized a posture towards the future, as it is literary or any other kind of descriptive "criticism". The thesis thus purposely stays away from compiling and citing all the latest definitions, theories and summations of the tenns "poetics" and "postmodemism", and instead seeks to work out a definition, literally and figuratively, from what might emerge out of not simply one discipline or one historical epoch, but a necessary convergence of many. 1 Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodemism (London: Routledge, 1988), 231. 2 Ibid., 14ff. 111 The terms of the title which come between "poetics" and "postmodemism" are more confmed in nature, and thus lend themselves to a more specific treatment. The philosophy of reflection, which takes up the lengthy Chapter 1, is a particular, admittedly selective reading of how a certain metaphor has functioned within the history of Western, largely philosophical thought. The reading does not pretend to cover all angles of reflection within the large scope of time covered, nor all angles within each thinker presented, but it does intend to shed light on the immense importance, influence, or one might even say sovereignty that one metaphor has held over a vast period and in a variety of conceptual frameworks. Like all history of ideas, its narrative will be misleading, for there is always a myriad of complications and intricacies left unsaid that can radically alter the picture one way or the other. But it is hoped that the narrative will be seen for what it is, a necessary construction contributing to an overall sense of poetics. The figure of W.H. Auden is an important and integral part of the thesis· strategy.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • An Index to Alan Ansen's the Table Talk of W. H. Auden Edited By
    An Index to Alan Ansen’s The Table Talk of W. H. Auden Edited by Nicholas Jenkins Index Compiled by Jacek Niecko A Supplement to The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter Number 20 • June 2000 Jacek Niecko is at work on a volume of conversations and interviews with W. H. Auden. Adams, Donald James 68, 115 Christmas Day 1941 letter to Aeschylus Chester Kallman 105 Oresteia 74 Collected Poems (1976) 103, 105, Akenside, Mark 53 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, Amiel, Henri-Frédéric 25 114, 116, 118 Andrewes, Lancelot 75 Collected Poetry 108 Meditations 75 Dark Valley, The 104 Sermons 75 Dog Beneath the Skin, The 51, 112 Aneirin Dyer’s Hand, The xiii, 100, 109, 111 Y Gododdin 108 “Easily, my dear, you move, easily Ann Arbor, Michigan 20, 107 your head” 106 Ansen, Alan ix-xiv, 103, 105, 112, 115, Enemies of a Bishop, The 22, 107 117 English Auden, The 103, 106, 108, Aquinas, Saint Thomas 33, 36 110, 112, 115, 118 Argo 54 Forewords and Afterwords 116 Aristophanes For the Time Being 3, 104 Birds, The 74 Fronny, The 51, 112 Clouds, The 74 “Greeks and Us, The” 116 Frogs, The 74 “Guilty Vicarage, The” 111 Aristotle 33, 75, 84 “Hammerfest” 106 Metaphysics 74 “Happy New Year, A” 118 Physics 74 “I Like It Cold” 115 Arnason Jon “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” xv, 70 Icelandic Legends 1 “In Search of Dracula” 106 Arnold, Matthew xv, 20, 107 “In Sickness and In Health” 106 Asquith, Herbert Henry 108 “In the Year of My Youth” 112 Athens, Greece 100 “Ironic Hero, The” 118 Atlantic 95 Journey to a War 105 Auden, Constance Rosalie Bicknell “Law Like Love” 70, 115 (Auden’s mother) 3, 104 Letter to Lord Byron 55, 103, 106, Auden, Wystan Hugh ix-xv, 19, 51, 99, 112 100, 103-119 “Malverns, The” 52, 112 “A.E.
    [Show full text]
  • Sharpe, Tony, 1952– Editor of Compilation
    more information - www.cambridge.org/9780521196574 W. H. AUDen IN COnteXT W. H. Auden is a giant of twentieth-century English poetry whose writings demonstrate a sustained engagement with the times in which he lived. But how did the century’s shifting cultural terrain affect him and his work? Written by distinguished poets and schol- ars, these brief but authoritative essays offer a varied set of coor- dinates by which to chart Auden’s continuously evolving career, examining key aspects of his environmental, cultural, political, and creative contexts. Reaching beyond mere biography, these essays present Auden as the product of ongoing negotiations between him- self, his time, and posterity, exploring the enduring power of his poetry to unsettle and provoke. The collection will prove valuable for scholars, researchers, and students of English literature, cultural studies, and creative writing. Tony Sharpe is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He is the author of critically acclaimed books on W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens. His essays on modernist writing and poetry have appeared in journals such as Critical Survey and Literature and Theology, as well as in various edited collections. W. H. AUDen IN COnteXT edited by TONY SharPE Lancaster University cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521196574 © Cambridge University Press 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
    [Show full text]
  • First Name Initial Last Name
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository Sarah E. Fass. An Analysis of the Holdings of W.H. Auden Monographs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Rare Book Collection. A Master’s Paper for the M.S. in L.S. degree. April, 2006. 56 pages. Advisor: Charles B. McNamara This paper is an analysis of the monographic works by noted twentieth-century poet W.H. Auden held by the Rare Book Collection (RBC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It includes a biographical sketch as well as information about a substantial gift of Auden materials made to the RBC by Robert P. Rushmore in 1998. The bulk of the paper is a bibliographical list that has been annotated with in-depth condition reports for all Auden monographs held by the RBC. The paper concludes with a detailed desiderata list and recommendations for the future development of the RBC’s Auden collection. Headings: Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907-1973 – Bibliography Special collections – Collection development University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rare Book Collection. AN ANALYSIS OF THE HOLDINGS OF W.H. AUDEN MONOGRAPHS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL’S RARE BOOK COLLECTION by Sarah E. Fass A Master’s paper submitted to the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Library Science.
    [Show full text]
  • Newsletter 29
    The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter Number 29 ● December 2007 Contents Tony Sharpe: Paysage Moralisé: Auden and Maps 5 Alan Lloyd: Auden‘s Marriage Retraced 13 John Smart: Two Auden Centennial Festivals 19 Elizabeth Jones: The Spoken Word: Auden‘s BBC Recordings 20 Dana Cook, compiler: Meeting Auden: First Encounters and Initial Impressions (Part IV) 22 Edward Mendelson: A Few Things Auden Never Wrote 27 Sheaves from Sagaland: Three Mysteries Solved 29 Recent and Forthcoming 30 Memberships and Subscriptions 31 An Appeal to Members The Society operates on a proverbial shoestring (almost on a literal one), and membership fees do not quite cover the cost of printing and mailing the Newsletter. Because the costs of a sending a reminder let- ter are prohibitive, we rely on members to send their annual renewals voluntarily. If you have not sent a renewal in the past year, could you kindly do so now? Payment can conveniently be made by any of the methods described on the last page of this number. ISSN 0995-6095 Paysage Moralisé: Auden and Maps Reflecting on the links between his mature poetry and the childhood ‗private secondary sacred world‘ deriving from his fascination with lead-mining and its Pennine landscapes, Auden recalled ‗necessary textbooks on geology and machinery, maps, catalogues, guidebooks, and photographs‘ (CW,1 p. 424), in which his fantasy-life had been grounded before he ever visited the North Pennine moors. When, earlier, he told Geoffrey Grigson that ‗My Great Good Place is the part of the Pennines bounded on the S by Swaledale, on the N by the Romans Wall and on the W by the Eden Valley‘ (17 January 1950; Berg Collection),2 he offered a quasi-cartographical definition of a locality both physically specific and metaphysically general, whose geographical boundaries were defined as if visualised on a map – which is, in fact, the only ‗place‘ on which they could ever be ob- served simultaneously.
    [Show full text]
  • Auden and Religion.', in the Cambridge Companion to W
    Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 13 November 2008 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Reeves, G. (2004) 'Auden and religion.', in The Cambridge companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 188-199. Cambridge companions to literature. Further information on publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.2277/0521829623 Publisher's copyright statement: c Cambridge University Press 2004. Additional information: Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk GARETH REEVES Auden and religion Auden liked systems. He liked to categorize and pigeon-hole, but invariably with the awareness that all systems and categories only work on their own terms, that the systematizer is implicated in his creations, that consciousness, while freeing us to explain ourselves to ourselves and to each other, also imprisons us in the explanations we have framed.
    [Show full text]
  • ABSTRACT Augustinian Auden: the Influence of Augustine of Hippo on W. H. Auden Stephen J. Schuler, Ph.D. Mentor: Richard Rankin
    ABSTRACT Augustinian Auden: The Influence of Augustine of Hippo on W. H. Auden Stephen J. Schuler, Ph.D. Mentor: Richard Rankin Russell, Ph.D. It is widely acknowledged that W. H. Auden became a Christian in about 1940, but relatively little critical attention has been paid to Auden‟s theology, much less to the particular theological sources of Auden‟s faith. Auden read widely in theology, and one of his earliest and most important theological influences on his poetry and prose is Saint Augustine of Hippo. This dissertation explains the Augustinian origin of several crucial but often misunderstood features of Auden‟s work. They are, briefly, the nature of evil as privation of good; the affirmation of all existence, and especially the physical world and the human body, as intrinsically good; the difficult aspiration to the fusion of eros and agape in the concept of Christian charity; and the status of poetry as subject to both aesthetic and moral criteria. Auden had already been attracted to similar ideas in Lawrence, Blake, Freud, and Marx, but those thinkers‟ common insistence on the importance of physical existence took on new significance with Auden‟s acceptance of the Incarnation as an historical reality. For both Auden and Augustine, the Incarnation was proof that the physical world is redeemable. Auden recognized that if neither the physical world nor the human body are intrinsically evil, then the physical desires of the body, such as eros, the self-interested survival instinct, cannot in themselves be intrinsically evil. The conflict between eros and agape, or altruistic love, is not a Manichean struggle of darkness against light, but a struggle for appropriate placement in a hierarchy of values, and Auden derived several ideas about Christian charity from Augustine.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden Edited by Stan Smith Frontmatter More Information
    Cambridge University Press 0521829623 - The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden Edited by Stan Smith Frontmatter More information The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden This volume brings together specially commissioned essays by some of the world’s leading experts on the life and work of W. H. Auden, one of the major English-speaking poets of the twentieth century. The volume’s contributors include a prize-winning poet, Auden’s literary executor and editor, and his most recent, widely acclaimed biographer. It offers fresh perspectives on his work from new and established Auden critics, alongside the views of specialists from such diverse fields as drama, ecological and travel studies. It provides scholars, students and general readers with a comprehensive and authoritative account of Auden’s life and works in clear and accessible English. Besides providing authoritative accounts of the key moments and dominant themes of his poetic development, the Companion examines his language, style and formal innovation, his prose and critical writing and his ideas about sexuality, religion, psychoanalysis, politics, landscape, ecology and globalisation. It also contains a comprehensive bibliography of writings about Auden. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521829623 - The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden Edited by Stan Smith Frontmatter More information THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO W. H. AUDEN EDITED BY STAN SMITH © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521829623 - The Cambridge
    [Show full text]
  • Download Download
    The Infernal Present: Auden' s Use of Inferno III in "The Chimeras" James F.G. Weldon Auden first published "The Chimeras" in TLS on March 9, 1951, and it also appeared later that year in the volume Nones. The poem lightly satirizes modern, urban society with its plurality of human objects which Auden calls the "crowd," and warns the reader against self-destructive involvement with the mythological beasts of the title. Critical response has been slight, and one writer labels the poem "inconsequential." 1 A deceptive "ease of 2 surface" and comic tone, however, mask a complex sociological and metaphysical vision of the contemporary world, a vision intensified by the deliberate and imaginative use of source mate- rial. "The Chimeras" recreates the dramatic situation of Canto III of Dante's Inferno, and, although the speaker's (and, by exten- sion, the reader's) identity, the scene, and the literary framework itself remain implicit, the final lines, part amplification and part translation, recall Virgil's counsel to his pilgrim charge, so that the poem not only echoes the classic source, but is a modern reworking of it. Canto III introduces the Gate of Hell with its terrible inscrip- tion, through which Dante passes to the vestibule where he be- 3 holds for the first time damned souls in torment. These are the "trimmers" or "neutrals" — those human spirits and fallen angels 4 who lived "sanza infamia e sanza lodo," "without infamy and 5 without praise" ; they are non-beings "che mai non fur vivi" (1. 64) — "who never were alive," who existed without moral com- mitment and who now occupy the vestibule within the Gate but 6 outside the circles of Hell proper.
    [Show full text]
  • © in This Web Service Cambridge University
    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19657-4 - W. H. Auden in Context Edited by Tony Sharpe Index More information Index Acton, Harold, 91 ‘As It Seemed to Us’, 14 ‘The Acts of John’, 86 ‘At the Grave of Henry James’, 75, 131, 375 The Adelphi, 338, 345 ‘Atlantis’, 50, 130 Agee, James, 215 ‘Aubade’, 348 Alexander, Michael, 260 ‘Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Allen, Bill, 147 Testament’, 83, 241 Allen, John, 223, 225 ‘August for the people and their favourite Alston Moor, 15, 16 islands’, 41, 43, 212, 317 Alvarez, A. A., 365 ‘Balaam and his Ass’, 308 Amsterdam, 316 Berlin journals (unpublished), 24, 26, 317, Anders als die Andern, 103 355 Anglo-Saxon Reader (Sweet), 261 ‘Brothers and Others’, 272, 273 Ansen, Alan, 83, 91, 103, 121, 295n, 369, 378 ‘Bucolics’, 59, 64, 77, 178 Arendt, Hannah, 107, 126 ‘California’, 52 Aristotle, 181 ‘Case Histories’, 345 Arnold, Matthew, 49 ‘Christmas 1940’, 63 Ashbery, John, 124, 355 ‘Commentary’, 155, 157, 185 Astor, Lady Nancy, 146 ‘Consider this and in our time’, 2, 38, 153, Atlantic, 125 205–6 Auden, Constance, 69, 107 ‘Control of the passes was, he saw, the key’ Auden, George, 151, 259 (‘The Secret Agent’), 16, 20, 287, 361 Auden, John, 15, 45, 84, 86, 236 ‘Dame Kind’, 108 Auden’s writings ‘Deftly, admiral, cast your fly’, 334, 363 ‘1929’, 299, 362 ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’, 183, 308, 363, 365 ‘A Bride in the ‘30s’, 376 ‘Dover’, 342–4 A Certain World, 19, 77, 87, 260, 329 ‘Easily, my dear,. .’, 207–8, 213 A Choice of de la Mare’s Verse, 360 Elegy for Young Lovers, 250, 324 ‘A Communist to Others’,
    [Show full text]
  • “And the Angel Will Not Come”: W. H. Auden and the Paradox of Poetic Language “And the Angel Will Not Come”: W. H. Auden
    Nueva Revista del Pacífico 2020, N° 73 (pp. 186-209). ISSN (e) 0719-5176 186 “AND THE ANGEL WILL NOT COME”: W. H. AUDEN AND THE PARADOX OF POETIC LANGUAGE “AND THE ANGEL WILL NOT COME”: W. H. AUDEN Y LA PARADOJA DEL LENGUAJE POÉTICO Paula Baldwin Lind Universidad de los Andes [email protected] Resumen: El objetivo de este artículo es analizar las nociones de poesía y de lenguaje poético que propone W. H. Auden (1907-1973) desde su perspectiva de crisis de la cultura moderna, en una selección de ensayos y poemas, con especial énfasis en “Autumn Song” (1936). En esta obra, el ángel que no llega a la Tierra, la parálisis de los seres vivos y el silencio dominante muestran las limitaciones del lenguaje humano al intentar dar cuenta de la realidad y de las experiencias personales. Aunque la figura del espíritu celeste, la estación de otoño en que se enmarca el poema y las imágenes de desencanto resultan claves para su interpretación, es fundamental considerar las ideas religiosas y filosóficas que Auden desarrolló durante su carrera, las que permiten comprender mejor su poética. Paradójicamente, a la vez que el poeta angloamericano reconoce la limitación de las palabras, encuentra en el lenguaje poético un camino posible para conocer y explorar lo que significa ser humano con todo su misterio. Palabras clave: W. H. Auden, lenguaje poético, silencio, desencanto, conocimiento. Abstract: The aim of this article is to analyze the notions of poetry and poetic language proposed by W. H. Auden (1907-1973) from his perspective of crisis of modern culture, in a selection of essays and poems, with special emphasis on “Autumn Song” (1936).
    [Show full text]
  • What Kind of Guy? Michael Wood
    8/14/2015 Michael Wood reviews ‘Later Auden’ by Edward Mendelson · LRB 10 June 1999 Back to article page What Kind of Guy? Michael Wood Later Auden by Edward Mendelson Faber, 570 pp, £25.00, May 1999, ISBN 0 571 19784 1 ‘That is the way things happen,’ Auden writes in ‘Memorial for the City’, a poem Edward Mendelson dates from June 1949, for ever and ever Plum­blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall covers The cries of the whipped and the sighs of the lovers And the hard bright light composes A meaningless moment into an eternal fact Which a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile: One enjoys glory, one endures shame; He may, she must. There is no one to blame. Except that this is not the way things happen, only the way we have been taught to see them, by epic poets and the news camera. ‘Our grief is not Greek,’ Auden adds, meaning that the story of our time is not helpless pain and pity, however noble, not the repetitive horror of http://www.lrb.co.uk.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/v21/n12/michael­wood/what­kind­of­guy 1/12 8/14/2015 Michael Wood reviews ‘Later Auden’ by Edward Mendelson · LRB 10 June 1999 fame or disgrace or death without meaning on an indifferent earth. As we bury our dead We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear. We should probably add straightaway that the ancient Greeks also knew this, even if their reasons were different, so their grief wasn’t Greek in this sense either, but Auden’s point remains, a post­Holocaust secularisation of T.S.
    [Show full text]
  • Newsletter 29
    The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter Number 29 ● December 2007 Memberships and Subscriptions Annual memberships include a subscription to the Newsletter: Individual members £9 $15 Students £5 $8 Institutions £18 $30 New members of the Society and members wishing to renew should send sterling cheques or checks in US dollars payable to ‘The W. H. Auden Society’ to Katherine Bucknell, 78 Clarendon Road, London W11 2HW. Receipts available on request. Payment may also be made by credit card through the Society’s web site at: http://audensociety.org/membership.html The W. H. Auden Society is registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales as Charity No. 1104496. The Newsletter is edited by Farnoosh Fathi. Submissions may be made by post to: The W. H. Auden Society, 78 Clarendon Road, London W11 2HW; or by e-mail to: thenewsletter-at-audensociety.org All writings by W. H. Auden in this issue are copyright 2007 by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Please see the Appeal to Members that appears on the Contents page of this number. 31 Recent and Forthcoming W. H. Auden, by Tony Sharpe, a title in the Routledge Guides to Lite- Contents rature Series, was published in the autumn of 2007.. Tony Sharpe: W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume III, 1949-1955 (The Complete Works of Paysage Moralisé: Auden and Maps 5 W. H. Auden), edited by Edward Mendelson, will be published by Alan Lloyd: Princeton University Press in December 2007. Auden’s Marriage Retraced 13 The Ilkley Literature Festival held several Auden-related events in John Smart: September and October 2007.
    [Show full text]