W. H. Auden as a Modern Poet || W. H. Auden as a War and Love Poet || W. H. Auden Themes

 

 

W. H. AUDEN AS A MODERN POET

 

INTRODUCTION:

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) is an Anglo-American poet of English literature. Auden, influenced by Eliot, Hopkins, Kipling, Freud and Marx, is popular as the most representative poet of the thirties. He served as a Chancellor of the ‘Academy of American Poets’ from 1954 to 1973. He has been unanimously acclaimed as a war poet and as a poet of modernism and experimentation. He has written poems on love, death and war.

AUDEN’S FAMOUS POEMS:

Lullaby, Funeral Blues, Autumn Song, As I Walked Out One Evening, Epitaph on a Tyrant, In Memory of W. B. Yeats, The Unknown Citizen, September 1, 1939, The Fall of Rome, The Shield of Achilles, The More Loving One

 

TWO PHASES IN AUDEN’S POETIC CAREER:

 

Auden’s literary career can be divided into two phases.

 

In the FIRST PHASE he was influenced by both Marx and Freud. His early poetry appears as a strange fusion of Freudian and Marxist views. The main theme of his early poetry is social criticism and protest. This early poetry expresses the poet’s reaction to the political, social and economic issues of 1930s.

 

The SECOND PHASE shows a change in Auden’s interests. The poetry of this phase reflects his deep understanding of life and its problems. He deals with the response of the individual to social living. ‘The Unknown Citizen’ is a beautiful satire on the loss of the individuality in a bureaucratic society. After some time Auden gave up communism. Consequently his poetry took a religious and metaphysical turn.

 

AUDEN AS A MODERN POET:

Professor Beach is right when he calls Auden "a typically modern poet". Both thematically and structurally, Auden’s poems show the very essence of modernism. The themes of love, death and war and his experimentation and anti-romanticism make him a modern poet. Let’s discuss this in detail.

Themes of Love, Death and War in Auden’s Poetry:

Themes such as love, death, and wars are present in many of W. H. Auden's poems.

Theme of Love:

Many of Auden's poems explore love in different ways, yet each time there is an undercurrent of sadness. This is demonstrated in poems such as 'Funeral Blues' and 'Are You There?'. A key feature of Auden's poetry is how he combines the themes of love and sorrow together. In 'Funeral Blues' (1936), he writes:

“My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”

Again in his other poem 'Are you there?' (1963), we find this combination of love and grief. Mark these lines:

“Each lover has some theory of his own

About the difference between the ache

Of being with his love, and being alone”

Theme of Death:

Death is also a common theme in Auden's work. He lived through both world wars, as well as numerous other conflicts, and it is clear that this had an effect on his writing. Auden has presented this theme of death in his poems like 'Funeral Blues' (1936) and ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ (1939), ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1939). Mark these lines:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Theme of War:

Auden was a witness of the two World Wars and he has been rightly termed as a poet of war. The World Wars had a significant impact on his life and his poetry. Auden's portrayal of the causes and impacts of war set him apart from many other poets for this reason. In 'September 1, 1939', he writes:

“What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.”

In 'The Shield of Achilles' (1952), he describes the war scene:

“A million eyes, a million boots in line,

Without expression, waiting for a sign.”

Again he describes the brutal armies in 'In the Praise of Limestone' (1948):

“Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down

Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times

Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step”

In “In Memory of W. B Yeats”, he refers that all Europe is in the grip of the terror of war:

 

“In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequence in his hate.”

 

Here, the poet says that all the European nations are crying for war, like the dogs barking loudly.

ANTI-ROMANTICISM IN AUDEN’S POETRY:

To Auden, a poet is "a kind of chemist who mixed his poems out of words, while remaining detached from his own feelings. Feelings and emotional experiences were the only occasion which precipitated into his mind the idea of a poem." This is basically an anti-romantic attitude. Unlike the Romantics, Auden was keen to communicate his views to his readers and if possible, to establish a rapport with them. In 1936, he remarked:

 

"Those who have no interest in communications do not become artists either; they become mystics or mad men."

 

EXPERIMENTATION IN AUDEN’S POETRY:

The most peculiar quality of the modern poetry is the poet’s tendency is to experiment with different kinds of meter and versification. Auden is a modern in this respect. He has experimented with free verse, blank verse, the ballad meter etc. James Fenton wrote in the New Statesman: 

“For years—for over forty years—the technical experimentation started by Auden enlarged and enriched the scope of English verse. He rediscovered and invented more than any other modern poet.”

OBSCURITY IN AUDEN’S POETRY:

Auden's extraordinary style and diction and too much experimentation make him an obscure poet. He often writes in a telegraphic style in which connections, conjunctions, articles, even pronouns, are often missing. Moreover, this difficulty is also created by his frequent use of the terminology of modern psychology. He coins new words, and does not hesitate to use archaic, obsolete and unfamiliar words in his poems. Sometimes abstract nouns are personified and written with a capital letter.

CONCLUSION:

Thus, we may conclude the discussion by saying that W. H. Auden is indeed a modernist poet in the truest sense of the word. His poetry is infused with the ideas od frustration of modern man and destruction of the societies and cultures after the two World Wars. His experimentation in poetry also makes him a true modern poet. It is because of his immense contribution to English poetry that National Book Committee awarded him the National Medal for Literature in 1967. After his death in 1973, Joseph Brodsky wrote that his was “the greatest mind of the twentieth century.”

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