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W. H. Auden and the Meaning of Lyric Poetry Edward Quipp Phd. University of Edinburgh, 2007

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W. H. Auden and the Meaning of Lyric Poetry Edward Quipp Phd. University of Edinburgh, 2007 W. H. Auden and the Meaning of Lyric Poetry Edward Quipp PhD. University of Edinburgh, 2007. THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH AABBSSTTRRAACCTT OOFF TTHHEESSIISS Regulation 3.1.14 of the Postgraduate Assessment Regulations for Research Degrees refers These regulations are available via:- http://www.aaps.ed.ac.uk/regulations/exam.htm Name of Edward Quipp Candidate: Address : Postal Code: Degree: PhD Title of W. H. Auden and the Meaning of Lyric Poetry Thesis: No. of words in the main text of Thesis: 97462 My thesis proceeds from recent critical discussion about the status of the aesthetic object after the decline of high theory of the 1980s and 1990s. The term “singularity”, articulated by critics working with the ideas of Martin Heidegger, has been variously applied to the artwork in the attempt to describe the generative power of art as separable from any historical or political determinants that may shape it. What makes the experience of art “singular”, that is, an experience governed by the artwork itself, without the scaffolding of theory or context? Such a question, I argue, actually demands a return to the first principles of close textual criticism, along with a rigorous approach to genre. The lyric poetry of W. H. Auden provides the ideal material for “singular” criticism. Unpacking the term lyric and redefining it according to Auden’s particular poetics, I consider how Auden inaugurated a new manner of experiencing modern poetry based on the notion, implicit to the conventional understanding of lyric, of vocality. After an account of Heidegger’s influence on contemporary ideas on aesthetics, I consult the work of Theodor Adorno, and later Hannah Arendt, in order to situate Auden’s early work in a European context, opposing the Atlanticism which has governed the vast majority of Auden criticism. Working to restore the power of the first encounter with the poem to historically and philosophically nuanced textual analysis, I present the key works of Auden’s early corpus in a new light. E:\Thesis Abstract.doc Use this side only E:\Thesis Abstract.doc Use this side only W. H. Auden and the Meaning of Lyric Poetry Chapter One: Introduction. The Experience of Poetry , 1 Chapter Two: The Lyric in the Thirties , 53 Chapter Three: Monody, Chorus and Love Lyric , 100 Chapter Four: From Love to Lightness – Defining Auden’s Light Verse , 138 Chapter Five: Lyric and Modern Politics , 175 Chapter Six: Lyric as Song , 214 Chapter Seven: Suffering and Lyric’s “Way of Happening” , 246 Bibliography: 274 Chapter One. I - Introduction. The Experience of Poetry This thesis stems from an apparently innocuous wish, but one which pertains to critical debates of many inflections. It is the wish to describe the experience of reading poetry. First, in a particular sense, the poetry of W. H. Auden prompted such curiosity, and will comprise the substance of this project. Second, I hope that descriptions of my experience of reading Auden might contain aspects that extend beyond the study of this one poet. The question about the nature of our encounter with poetry opens onto densely populated critical terrain where particular concerns about one poet or one period are always forebodingly shadowed by a cluster of general issues well noted for their seemingly intractable character, such as the relationship between aesthetics and society; the relationship between aesthetic experiences and other, different ones; the nature of poetic language and of poetic modernism; and the question of the proper ascription of academic periods and groupings. This is by no means an exhaustive or an especially exact list, but it gives an indication of some of the questions that will recur throughout my readings of Auden, and which will be meditated upon as I seek to prepare those readings with a number of conceptual prologues. These conceptual sections proceed from the urgencies of the poetry itself. My approach is to venture a way of reading Auden that can be understood in contradistinction to the received critical material on his early career, without undermining the significance of this material. There is a neat synchrony to this project in that 2007 will mark the centenary of Auden’s birth, but my attempt to read his work and to recount and consider the nature of meeting Auden on the page gathers its impetus from recent critical debates regarding the value of aesthetics. A variety of theoretical issues comprise the tributary streams leading into my discussion of Auden’s early work. In tandem with a survey of these issues, this thesis will provide an account of Auden’s place in the milieu of the 1930s and will look particularly closely at debates about the standing of poetry during the period in question. This dual emphasis will be present in close readings. I intend that they are as well attuned to the 1 theoretical as to the historical, but that they accord a crucial privilege to the personal meeting with a given poem, in an encounter which is finally irreducible to either a doctrinaire theoretical view or to a reconstructive approach along the lines of cultural history. My approach to Auden hinges upon a speculative redefinition of lyric. Auden is frequently recorded (and just as frequently praised) as a lyric poet. His stature in the history of twentieth century poetry is at this point beyond question, and any attempt to read his poetry in a way that dissents from the acknowledged meanings of forms and genres runs the risk of being contradicted from numerous standpoints. But, as I will demonstrate, contemporaneous with Auden’s career - though not perhaps to his direct knowledge - there were major philosophical voices contesting the received definitions and accepted meanings of art and, moreover, those of the lyric itself. Indeed, the lyric is vital to these voices as a tool to explicate wider ideas. Happily, these voices – of Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno – both speak (and argue with one another) to form the fons et origo of the theoretical issues which dominate contemporary discussions about the nature and value of aesthetics. Hence, to restate the dual emphasis of this thesis, there is an imperative not to hypostatise theory and history as separate entities, but, in light of Auden’s early career, to bring them into an ongoing exchange with the poetry. Because of their historical proximity to Auden, and because many of the burning issues of European life in the thirties transcended national boundaries in obvious ways, the respective ideas of Heidegger and Adorno on aesthetics can contribute a good deal to our understanding of literary life in England at the time of Auden’s early career, as well as providing the present day reader with the basis of a new vocabulary with which to describe what happens when he or she reads Auden. In this sense I try to resist the Anglo-centrism (or Atlanticism) in Auden criticism: the tendency of Auden critics to give a solid narration of his centrality to local surroundings, but by the same token to neglect the opportunity to present Auden’s work as a highly significant intervention in a broader, European philosophical argument about the nature of art and of poetry. This is not to reduce poetry to philosophy. My abiding preoccupation with the potential of the lyric, and the need to redefine it, is governed by Auden. Heidegger and Adorno offer the most 2 influential and conceptually robust explorations of what the lyric might be, and so this chapter focuses on their work to form a prelude to later close readings in which Auden’s lyric takes centre stage. We will see that lyric is a very different thing to each of the German thinkers, and this first chapter will establish what those differences are and how they might inspire a modified understanding of Auden, his age and his subsequent reception. Thus we can arrive at a new account of Auden’s poetics and a new interpretation of exactly what it is that makes his work so compelling to the individual reader, and so important to critics. The most appropriate way to preface the ideas of Heidegger and Adorno, for their part, is to consider some more recent statements on the possible value of the experience of art in the present day. Accordingly we can look to the sources of these positions and statements in the key texts of the two thinkers, and then broach a working understanding of what lyric means in the context of a study of Auden. Based on this, the second chapter will proceed by interrogating the notion of the Audenesque, and will then move into a consideration of the thirties through the prism of my own ideas about what the Audenesque actually signifies. I will submit that the methods and presuppositions of Auden criticism might benefit from being revised. As I have suggested, there is an ever-present constellation of other projections and interests revolving around the experience of poetry. Such interests can be categorised and isolated (and I will discuss the formulation of each where it becomes pressing in the context of Auden’s work), but the common basis of their attraction to art, and poetry specifically, is the possibility that the art-experience presents the means of access to an order of truth that is beyond the reach of other experiences. This truth is variously configured; for instance, art informs us about the nature of ethical life; or, art exposes the privations of our conditioned manner of thinking and reasoning; or, art reveals the reality of our communal existence. In each case, the affectivity of art is claimed in the name of a specific purpose, and each claimant formulates a version of a general practice (of ethics, for example, or of politics) from a particular and inexchangeably personal experience of art.
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