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W. H. AUDEN's USE of POPULAR CULTURE DURING the 1930S R W. H. AUDEN’S USE OF POPULAR CULTURE DURING THE 1930s aMsî R. Michael Evers A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1980 Approved by Doctoral Committee : Advisor L ABSTRACT During the 1930s in Britain a group of writers, W.H. Auden in par­ ticular, responded to the social crises of the Depression and the approaching war by attempting to return to the idea of the poet as an integral part of the community using the language of that community to speak to it about matters of vital concern. The purpose of this study is to show how, during the thirties, Auden used artifacts embodying that language -- materials from folk and contemporary popular culture — to reach that community, and to examine how successful he was in doing so. Ideas about the social roots of language and literature, and the roles of the artist in society prevalent during the period under consi­ deration are examined. Two intellectual traditions are found: first, the idea of language as an entity in itself, a raw material to be shaped experimentally by an artist of refined sensibilities, and second, the idea of language as the embodiment of the culture and experiences of the whole community to be used by the artist to speak to that community. Although influenced by the first tradition, Auden and his group saw them­ selves as working in the second. Auden's lighter verse during the period is examined under the following categories: (1) those drawing from popular music, particularly the sentimental ballad; (2) those drawing from the folk tradition, par­ ticularly the narrative ballad; (3) polemical verse drawing from the native tradition of Skelton and Burns; (4) light occasional verse, sometimes drawing from Byron. Auden's plays, including those written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, are then studied, showing the popular materials he used. II In terms of appropriateness in his use of materials, Auden was generally successful, except in his first and last plays. His success in communicating to a large audience is in doubt, primarily because of his ambiguous feelings about popular culture and those who use it. Nevertheless, those feelings are themselves a source of power in his work. If u TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ........................................................ 1 CHAPTER I .................................................. 7 CHAPTER II.............................................................23 CHAPTER III..................................... 54 A. The Sentimental and" Torch" Ballad............................ 57 B. The Folk Idiom...............................................71 C. Polemical Verse..............................................106 D. Light Occasional Verse........................ 116 CHAPTER IV........................................................... 132 CONCLUSION . '....................... ................................. 173 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................... 179 í INTRODUCTION In the conclusion to Culture and Society, 1780-1950, Raymond Williams asserts that in Britain, between 1914 and 1945, a change occurred in the ideas concerning the relationship between the artist and the society he lived in. Previously, Williams says, the artist was seen as a defiant exile; the virtues of art were values in themselves, with no relation to the society around it. However, during the 1914-1945 period, a. "reinte­ gration of art with the common life of society"“'’ was attempted. It is this attempted integration during one part of this period that I wish to deal with in the following study. Specifically, I wish to examine how one literary artist, W.H. Auden, reacting not only to the social crisis created by the Depression of the nineteen thirties, but also to the problems of the relationship between artist and audience raised by the experimentalism.in the arts associated with Modernism, came to advocate, both in theory and in practice, the Idea of language as a common bond in a culture many felt was breaking up. In doing so he drew from their popular culture, particularly from forms of popular entertainment both of his own time and from the past — the film, the music hall review, jazz and blues, and the popular ballad, to name a few — and adopted in many of his works a vernacular style close to common speech. Furthermore, the personae he used in many of his works, particularly in the lyrics, was a rejection of the isolated artist-persona that was one inheritance of Romanticism and which had found its way into “'"Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), p. 296, (2) works of their immediate predecessors such as Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, the pronouncements of the latter to the contrary. The study will examine Auden's works, both the actual poetry as well as critical writings in order to get a broader view of the decade of the thirties, which, it seems to me, was crucial for two reasons. First, it was a time of intense social involvment for these writers, as well as for artists of all sorts. It was a time when those who had chosen to pursue artistic professions and who had grown up in comfortable circumstances began to question the value of their craft in the face of urgent social problems. Some writers, such as the critics Christopher Caudwell and R. D. Charques, felt that literature should contribute to a social revolution they felt was going to occur in Britain. Others, such as Michael Roberts, were more moderate in insisting that art should contribute to the unifying of a culture which seemed to be coming apart. Another group of writers, F.R. Leavis and those connected with the periodical Scrutiny, rejected the culture created by contemporary mass media,, yet continually asserted that a vital literature was one enriched by the language of the lower classes, particularly the peasantry. Also, writers began paying attention to popular culture: people such as George Orwell, for example, wrote about postcards and boys' magazines and were suspicious of literary modern ism. Second, the decade of the thirties was important because, I feel, the writers working during this time were becoming increasingly aware not simply that their concerns did not always seem to be the concerns of ordinary humanity, but that literature itself did not have the importance it once had. Society was becoming "postliterate" in the sense that (3) individuals were perceiving themselves and their environments not in images drawn from literature but in images drawn from the mass media. While this thesis is difficult to prove without wandering into territory peripheral to the subject of this study, it is helpful to remember, as Paul Fussell reminds us in his The Great War and Modern Memory, that By 1914, it was possible for soldiers to be not merely literate but vigorously literary, for the Great War occurred at a special historical moment when two "liberal" forces were powerfully coinciding in England. On the one hand, the belief in the educative powers of classical and English literature was still extremely strong. On the other, the appeal of popular education and "self-improvement" was at its peak, and such education was still conceived largely in humanistic terms. It was imagined that the study of literature at Workmen's Insti­ tutes and through such schemes as the National Home Reading Union would actively assist those of modest origins to rise in the class system. The volumes of the World's Classics and Everyman's Library were to be the "texts." The intersection of these two forces, the one "aristocratic," the other "demo­ cratic," established an atmosphere of public respect for litera­ ture unique in modern times.2 Fussell adds that even ordinary people during the First World War did not feel that literature was somehow outside their experience, or that it was the exclusive property of critics, aesthetes, or teachers. The reason for this, he says, is that without cinema, radio, and television, amusement was found in sex, drinking, and "in language formally arranged, either in books, and periodicals or at the theater and music hall, or in one's own or one's friends’ anecdotes, rumors, or clever structuring of Q words.” The point Fussell is making Is that before the advent of the mass media and other popular forms of entertainment, literature had a central place not only in the culture of the elite but in popular culture 2 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 157. 3 Fussell, p. 158. (4) as well. That it had been displaced by other forms of entertainment by the 1930s was a complaint articulated by many, especially by the members of the Leavis group. At any rate, it follows that if literature no longer occupied a central place in the culture, then those who were com­ mitted to literature felt displaced, and this feeling of displacement, as well as the social crisis, led many writers to seek a reintegration of artist and society. This meant that whatever the personal and ideological differences between writers — and there were many -- they all felt that artists should have at least some concern for social and cultural problems, and that language and the art that came from language were social products created within a social context that could possibly be used for social ends. As a group, Auden and the writers associated with him exercised a tremendous influence on other writers and critics. The work of the British cultural critics Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, to name two important examples, was directly influenced by the notion that a common culture requires a common language accessible to all, and not merely to an elite. So in examining Auden's work written during the thirties, we will be look­ ing at how this notion was put to work by a writer brought up not only on the works of the Victorians and later Victorians; a writer who, during the period of the nineteen thirties felt a need, often reluctantly, for a larger audience, and who felt that a closer connection would somehow heal the division between poet and people, between class and class.
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