1. Taming the Monster 1. Geoffrey Grigson, 'Auden As a Monster', New
Notes 1. Taming the Monster 1. Geoffrey Grigson, ‘Auden as a Monster’, New Verse, 26–7 (1937), 13–17 (p. 13). 2. New Signatures appeared for the first time in 1932, New Country in 1933; New Verse was published from January 1933 until January 1939, New Writing from Spring 1936 until 1950. See Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1976), pp. 74–5, 102, 114, 198. 3. Richard Hoggart’s Auden: An Introductory Essay (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), the first and surprisingly good study of Auden’s works, set the tone with the remark ‘Auden’s poetry is particularly concerned with the pressures of the times’, p. 9. 4. François Duchêne, The Case of the Helmeted Airman: A Study of W. H. Auden’s Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972) is an unpleasant example of this vivisection attitude that regards the author as a part of the texts and endeavours to supply its reader not only with a textual analysis, but glimpses of the author’s psyche. Herbert Greenberg, Quest for the Necessary: W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Con- sciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) is a more sensitive study. 5. Auden himself proves a perceptive commentator on such attitudes when he writes in the preface to The Poet’s Tongue of 1935, ‘The psy- chologist maintains that poetry is a neurotic symptom, an attempt to compensate by phantasy for a failure to meet reality. We must tell him that phantasy is only the beginning of writing; that, on the contrary, like psychology, poetry is a struggle to reconcile the unwilling subject and object; in fact, that since psychological truth depends so largely on context, poetry, the parabolic approach, is the only adequate medium for psychology’ (Pr 108).
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