Paper 4, Module 22: Text Role Name Affiliation Principal Investigator Prof. Tutun Mukherjee University of Hyderabad Paper Coordinator Prof. Hariharan Institute of English, University of Balagovindan Kerala Content Writer/Author Dr. Sushil Kumar DB College, Sasthamkotta (CW) Content Reviewer (CR) Dr. Jameela Begum Former Head & Professor, Institute of English, University of Kerala Language Editor (LE) Prof. Hariharan Institute of English, University of Balagovindan Kerala 2 W. H. Auden (1907-1973) Keywords:- Auden – major works – influences – themes – love – politics - peace –neurosis-death – fear- Author and his major Contributions Wystan Hugh Auden (image 1) was born on February 21,1907 at York in a professional middle class family. (image 2)He was the third son of George Augustins and Constance Rosallo. W.H Auden was sent to St.Edmund’s school, where he acquired the friendship of Christopher Isherwood(image 4). He visited Berlin in 1928 and was influenced by German poetry. In 1929 Isherwood abandoned his medical profession and joined Auden in Berlin In 1935, he collaborated with Christopher Isherwood on a play with the title The Dog Beneath the Skin. Auden married Erika Mann, daughter of German novelist Thomas Mann, in 1935. In 1937 he visited Spain during the civil war and served as an ambulance driver on the Republican side. In 1938, he visited China with Isherwood. In 1938 Auden became a U.S. citizen and in 1948, he received the Pulitzer Prize for the work The Age of Anxiety. Auden was one of three candidates recommended by the Nobel Committee to the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963. It was at Oxford that Auden became the pivotal member of a group of writers called the “Oxford Group” or the “Auden Generation.” He along with Louise MacNeice, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis shared the name ‘Pink Poets’ and the ‘Poets of 1930’s. They are lumped 3 together as a complete figure and called MacSpaunday in the acronym used to designate these four poets. Sir Stephen Harold Spender (1909-1995), first came to prominence as a poet of social protest in the 1930s.He is one among the “four musketeers of the Oxford Movement”, a member of the generation of British poets who came to prominence in the 1930s. They together share some characteristics: i. Their thematic content contained marks of innovation and experimental modernness. ii. They had more intellectual and less emotional appeal. iii. Their political involvement with communism was born out of a sense of guilt and involvement. iv. Sigmund Freud also influenced these poets. v. Their common identity was reflected in their cynicism and satire. vi. Their poetic technique was greatly influenced by Imagism, French Symbolism and Hopkins-Eliot innovations. The group adhered to various Marxist and anti-fascist doctrines and addressed social, political, and economic concerns in their writings. Auden’s first book of poetry, Poems, was privately printed by Stephen Spender in 1928. Critics have noted that Auden’s early verse suggests the influences of Thomas Hardy, Laura Riding, Wilfred Owen, and Edward Thomas. Stylistically, his poems are fragmentary and terse, relying on concrete images and colloquial language to convey Auden’s political and psychological concerns. Marxism was the dominating influence on Auden’s poetry. Auden’s poems, published in the thirties of the twentieth century, a turbulent period in the history, show the shallowness of the disintegrating post war civilization. 4 Poems (1930), The Orators (1932) and The Dance of Death (1933) show the influence of both Freud and Marx and express contemporary political tensions, social and economic unrest. Auden's themes in his shorter poems include the fragility and transience of personal love ("Danse Macabre", "The Dream", "Lay your sleeping head). In 1938 he wrote a series of dark, ironic ballads about individual failure ("Miss Gee", "James Honeyman", "Victor"). All these together with other famous poems such as "Dover", "As He Is", and "Musée des Beaux Arts" ,"In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "The Unknown Citizen", "Law Like Love", "September 1, 1939", and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud” appeared in his collection, Another Time (1940). The volume also contains elegies to poets A. E. Housman, Matthew Arnold, and William Butler Yeats. From 1942 through 1947 he worked mostly on three long poems in dramatic form, each different from the others in form and content. Auden’s next major work, Nones, includes another widely anthologized piece, “In Praise of Limestone,” which asserts a powerful connection between the landscape depicted and the psychology of Auden’s characters. His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956–61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid- 1940s. His later poetry consists of The Shield of Achilles (1955) City Without Walls (1969), Epistle to a Godson(1972) and the unfinished Thank You, Fog (1974) ) include reflective poems about language ("Natural Linguistics") and about his own ageing ("A New Year Greeting", "Talking to Myself", "A Lullaby" "The din of work is subdued"). His last completed poem, in haiku form, was "Archeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later years. 5 T he German-Soviet pact disillusioned him and shook his faith in Communism. As a result he abandoned Communism and took metaphysical and religious faith. Auden died in Vienna, Austria, on September 29, 1973. (Wikipedia) Stephen Harold Spender met the poets W.H. Auden and C. Day-Lewis, and during 1930–33. He spent many months in Germany with the writer Christopher Isherwood. His early volumes, Poems (1933), Vienna(1934), Trial of a Judge, a verse play (1938), and The Still Centre (1939)—were influenced by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Federico García Lorca. Above all, his poems expressed a self-critical, compassionate personality. In the following decades Spender, in some ways a more personal poet than his early associates, became increasingly more autobiographical, turning his gaze from the external topical situation to the subjective experience. His reputation for humanism and honesty is fully vindicated in subsequent volumes—Ruins and Visions (1942), Poems of Dedication (1947), The Edge of Being (1949), Collected Poems (1955), Selected Poems (1965), The Generous Days (1971), and Dolphins(1994). At the end of the 1930s, when the nature of Stalinist rule had become more evident—especially after the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939—Spender became disillusioned with Russian Communism. Especially eloquent testimony of this disenchantment with Communism can be found in Spender's essay in The God That Failed (1949). From the 1940s Spender was better known for his perceptive criticism and his editorial association with the influential reviews Horizon (1940–41) and Encounter (1953–67) than he was as a poet. Spender’s prose works include short stories (The Burning Cactus, 1936), a novel (The Backward Son, 1940), literary criticism (The Destructive Element, 1935; The 6 Creative Element, 1953; The Making of a Poem, 1955; The Struggle of the Modern, 1963), an autobiography (World Within World, 1951; reissued 1994), and uncollected essays with new commentary (The Thirties and After, 1978). He died in London on July 17, 1995. Poetic Characteristics Though intellectual and unemotional, his poetry shows a deep empathy with the essential human condition. What distinguishes Spender’s poetry is the combination of his commitment to the left wing political ideology with his own personal feelings and emotions. He also composed highly moving poems on war. He beautifully expressed his personal emotions in short lyrics. Spender was an accomplished poetic artist who used exact words. In his best poems every word has its value for sound as well as sense. Themes in Auden In an age as confusing and volatile as the interwar period, it was natural that the main themes in literature among young writers and poets would be the social, political and the economic malaise of the period. Auden was not an exception. His works are noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. He was known as the spiritual physician of his generation. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature. Auden’s early works are noted for the themes like love, politics, peace, neurosis, death fear, and character http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/524417.W_H_Auden 7 Many of his poems, like “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “Lullaby,” and “O Tell Me the Truth About Love,” are the finest love poems, and “Funeral Blues” features a man deeply in love with another. But at the same time he is deeply concerned with the transience of love in modern world. Almost all of these poems have a sobering undercurrent of sorrow, or of the desire to remind readers that life, and love, are short and are affected by the vicissitudes of existence like sickness and time. Love is sweet, but it does not exist in a universe devoid of suffering, waning of affection or, of course, death. Auden's poetry is sometimes cerebral, sometimes brutally honest and evocative of the historical context in which he is writing. He is renowned for addressing the issues of his day in a moving and relevant manner. The horrors of the modern world do not escape his incisive pen; he deals with the dictators and their mad quest for world domination, the fall of the masses under their leaders' spell, the stultifying bureaucratic state, the Spanish Civil War, the bleakness and perhaps impossibility of the future, the psychic side of warfare, the bleak landscape, the martyrdom of heroes and the death of poets, the unthinking use of modern tools, and the bludgeoning of the human spirit through the great weight of history.