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Anthropomorphism in the Poetry of WH Auden

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Anthropomorphism in the Poetry of WH Auden And the Word was made Flesh: Anthropomorphism in the Poetry of W.H. Auden by MARTIN HURLEY Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the subject ENGLISH at the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA SUPERVISOR: Professor I. A. RABINOWITZ CO-SUPERVISOR: DR H. SEWLALL JANUARY 2016 © University of South Africa 2016 Page 1 _____________________________________________________________________________ To my Wife ’Peg’ – Jeong Ae-Ran For my Parents Julia Imelda Murray & Bartholomew Hurley – who worked or went to work so we could go to school. My Gratitude To: Séan P. O’Connell, Douglas Community School, Cork, Ireland. Howard Hussey, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Stanford Bazilian M.D., Philadelphia School of Psycho-Analysis. Professor Ivan Rabinowitz, University of South Africa. ___________________________ Jubail, Saudi Arabia ________________________________ 2008-2015 © University of South Africa 2016 Page 2 Contents M.A. Dissertation Cover Page Page 1 Dedication Page 2 Contents & Declaration Page 3 Summary Page 4 Biographical Note Page 5 Preface Page 6 Chapter One Auden’s ‘strategy of discourse’ Page 28 Chapter Two Auden’s Critical Reception Page 74 Chapter Three Anthropomorphism & Theory Page 118 Chapter Four Auden’s ‘lack of a social rhetoric’ Page 135 Chapter Five Introduction [a] Taxonomy, [b] Poetry, [c] Poetics Page 161 Conclusion Page 290 Select Bibliography Page 295 Declaration: And the Word was made Flesh: Anthropomorphism in the Poetry of W.H. Auden I declare that the above dissertation is my own work and that all the sources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references. Mr M. HURLEY ____________________________ ________________ January 2016 © University of South Africa 2016 Page 3 Summary And the Word Was Made Flesh: Anthropomorphism in the poetry of WH Auden examines the reasons for the neglect of Auden’s prolific deployment of anthropomorphism by examining the poetry’s critical reception with a view to understanding what larger purpose, what ‘strategy of discourse’ (Ricoeur 2003, The Rule of Metaphor: 5-9), Auden may have had in mind when he revived a trope traditionally regarded as retrograde. Anxious not to be mistaken for a Modern, yet unable to find a social rhetoric to suit his purposes, Auden elected upon a new style of poetry which questioned the very foundations of language by placing anthropomorphism, the ascription of agency and sentience to voiceless entities, at its centre. The study explores anthropomorphism from historical and theoretical perspectives in an attempt to explain the reasons for its demise, at least, within the academy. This study emphasises the importance Auden placed on the everyday activity of reading, the principal focus for the poet’s ‘cultural theory’ (Boly 1991 and 2004: 138). Auden, 'eager to create a tradition of its own' (Emig 2000: 1), abjuring propaganda, hoped to educate the reader to resist the different ideologies which were vying for ascendency during the 1930s. This study will demonstrate that anthropomorphism, with its capacity to suggest alternative words to ‘re- describe reality’ (Ricoeur 2003: 5), played a pivotal role in Auden’s project for cultural renewal. This study demonstrates that the lasting benefit of Auden’s use of anthropomorphism is to have recognised with prescience what critics now recognise as a 'revolutionary and potently counter-cultural tactic of cultural appropriation' (Paxson 1994: 173), a trope that 'engenders within its semiotic structure a hidden critique of Western culture' (Paxson: 50). Evidence from recent linguistic theory is marshalled in support of the trope’s rehabilitation. This study examines a selection of Auden’s four hundred published poems, and it also offers a provisional taxonomy to initiate the complex process of classifying instances of personification and its co-ordinate tropes in poetry. © University of South Africa 2016 Page 4 Biographical Note (Wystan Hugh) Auden was born in the city of York in the north of England in 1907. He attended Christ Church College, Oxford University from 1925 to 1928. Admitted to read Natural Sciences, he graduated in English Literature with a pass degree. His first book of Poetry entitled Poems was privately published in 1928, and released to the general public in 1930 while his last, Thank You Fog, appeared posthumously in 1974. In all, twenty books of poetry by Auden were published. He compiled twenty-two anthologies. Auden’s prose writings consist of four volumes of reviews, essays, prefaces and introductions comprising over 2800 printed pages, the great majority of which appeared in publications of record. Auden variously worked as a teacher, editor, anthologist, reviewer, and travel writer. In the 1930s in Great Britain, Auden became an active spokesman for left wing opinion and for what came to be known as the Auden Generation. Auden visited Iceland in 1936, China in 1938 and Spain in 1939. In 1945, he briefly worked for the US Army (Strategic Bombing Survey) in Germany. He moved to the United States in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946. He was briefly married in 1935 to Erika Mann, the sister of the novelist Thomas Mann, in order to help her to escape from Germany. He otherwise lived life as a confirmed bachelor. In his later life, he divided his time between Ischia, near Naples, and New York City. He was elected with a significant majority to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford University in 1956 where he remained until 1961. He died in Austria, where he is buried, in 1973. © University of South Africa 2016 Page 5 Preface According to Brian L. Moore’s 2008 study, Ecology and Literature, Ecocentric Personification from Antiquity to the Twenty-first Century, ‘Few concepts in literary studies are less fashionable than personification, which is, by almost all accounts, an archaic, even discredited figure of speech’. Moore asserts that ‘A contemporary who seeks less to dismiss [rather] than affirm the trope – who essentially argues for the validity of personification as a means of argument and artistic expression – may be for some comparable to a physician propounding the merits of leeching or a contemporary scientist arguing for a Ptolemaic view of the universe’ (Moore 2008: 1). Arguing in favour of anthropomorphism,1 the ascription of agency or sentience to inanimate objects, represents the least of the problems facing anyone who seeks to play a part in the rehabilitation of a trope, still widely regarded as déclassé, within a body of poetry where its performative role has been either completely ignored, or grandly dismissed as ‘degenerate’ (see Jarrell 1951-2, 2005: 47-63), Auden’s ‘device of decadence’ (Jarrell: 52). Given the compromised state of this field of study, modest aims can serve to strengthen the case for a reappraisal of a literary device that has been as popular among poets as it has been unpopular within the academy. One aim of this study will be to present relevant and constructive evidence from the compendious literary-critical history of anthropomorphism to supply a context to understand and classify Auden’s personification of voiceless entities. Another aim will be to present suitable examples from Auden’s four-hundred published poems to begin the process of identifying ‘paradigmatic deployments’ (Paxson 1994: 2) of the trope. In keeping with the requirement that a dissertation prove its thesis, this study will demonstrate that Auden’s use of anthropomorphism was part of a concerted effort to influence the reading public to assume a more proactive role in their discrimination of the various ideologies that vied for their attentions during the 1930s. This study will do this by affirming the 1 From Ancient Greek and Late Latin: ‘ánthrōpos, man, human being or body; poein, to make or turn; morphḗ, form’. http://www.memidex.com/anthropomorphic#etymology © University of South Africa 2016 Page 6 efficacy of a literary device that possesses the unusual capacities to inter alia re-describe reality and to critique culture. This can be achieved by demonstrating how competing conceptions of ‘truth’ can be weighed and measured in the public domain by exposing their discursive stratagems. The only definitive position that can be proved with regard to a body of poetry which engenders subjective participation (on the part of the reader) is to attempt to trace what brought such conditions about, how such ‘fragmentary poetics’ came into being. The absence of a consensus regarding the rhetorical component of the poet’s work, particularly grave given the current status of an as yet unreconstructed anthropomorphism, represents the prelude to renewed appreciation of a literary device, anthropomorphism, which gives expression to sentiments such as can be found in lines excerpted from Auden’s elegy for William Butler Yeats, Poem XXXIX, written in February, 1939, shortly after the poet’s passing. He disappeared in the dead of winter; The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day, O all the instruments agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; 2 By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems (1986: 241-3). 2 All poems are excerpted from WH Auden, The English Auden, Faber and Faber, 1986, London, Edited by Edward Mendelson. Many poems display numerals for titles. The page number is best followed as Roman numerals were frequently duplicated by the poet. © University of South Africa 2016 Page 7 Here, an alliterative euphemism, ‘disappeared in the dead of winter’, announces the demise of a poet whose reputation precedes him, captured within a simple personal pronoun, the ‘He’ of the poem. The estate of his weakened corpse is assisted by a sympathetic winter’s morning where the physical elements assist the author of the poem to take the temperature of a dark, cold day.
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