Carmen Torre

W. H. AUDEN

Introduction: Context of the Author & Main Characteristics.

Having written his earlier poems in the late 1920s and early 1930s, W. H. Auden is a poet
difficult to be “classified”. Partly a late modernist (he shares some common traits with writers under
this influence) and partly a postmodernist, he acts as a sort of hinge figure between periods. This is
reflected in the several different influences that affect his style, not to mention that even his style
changes significantly throughout his writing career.

As it regards influences, Auden's poetry was marked by:

• Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen (regarding metrical and verbal techniques).
• T. S. Eliot (his conversational and ironic tone, as well as an acute inspection of cultural
decay).
• Thomas Hardy (metrical variety, formal irregularity and fusion of panoramic and intimate
perspectives)
• Yeats. First and admirer of his serious reflective poems of “personal and public interest”,
later disavowing his grand aspirations and rhetoric.
• Familiar with the rhythms and long alliterative line of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
• Also influenced by folk culture (particularly: songs of the English music hall and, later,
American blues singers).

According to the obvious change in style during his life, critics tend to classify his writings
in two or three phases:
• Early Auden (poems from the 30s). His early poetry diagnoses the ills of his country
(warning specially against self-deception!) by means of a verse that combines irreverence
with skilfulness. It relies on both Freud and Marx to draw the picture of England. This work
has intellectual liveliness and nervous force, but its compressed, elliptical, impersonal style
creates difficulties of interpretation.
In the late 1930s → clarified imagery and syntax. Among these poems we find “Spain,
1937”. These aspire to a visionary perspective on political and social change.
• Later Auden.
• 1940s → Auden became increasingly sceptical of poetry as revelation or as a tool
for political change. Instead, he said that poetry was a form of truth telling that
should “disenchant and disintoxicate”1. During WW2, in contrast to Romanticism
and to the authoritarianism that was devastating Europe his style gained flatness,
irony and conversational tone.
• The more mistrustful about the poet's prophetic role he became, the more he
embraced the ordinary (“Horae Canonicae”). Themes like love and friendship are
frequent; his poems celebrate existence and invite to invest everyday with meaning.
When he joined the Church of England (like Eliot) his work started to be grounded
by a deep but obtrusive religious feeling.
• Throughout his entire career he never lost his ability to combine elements from popular art
with technical formality, vivid detail and allegorical abstraction. He always experimented,
particularlly in ways of bringing together high artifice and a colloquial tone (this was
accentuated with the years).
→ Compare Auden's and the Modernists attitude towards ordinary life.

Notes on “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

1 From his essay “Writing”

 • Line 20 → kind of rewriting of the beginning of Dante's Inferno. Dante says “In the middle
of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood were the straight way was lost”.
The line says “To find his happiness in another kind of wood”.
• The stanza pattern in section III echoes that of Yeats' late poem “Under Ben Bulben”. Auden
later ommited the section's second, third and fourth stanzas (as he changed his style with
time, he thoroughly revised many of his poems!).
• Lines 54-58 → reference to Yeats being at times anti-democratic and (apparently) favouring
dictatorship.

Style
Auden's manner of writing came to be known by the idiom “Audenesque”. Its main
characteristics could be:
• Vocabulary → copious use of the definite article, unusual adjectives and adjectival phrases,
and surprising similes, which have a reductive or trivialising effect; and personified
abstractions (Barbeito suggests “Spain 1937” as an example).
• “Devotion” to Marxism and Psychoanalysis as techniques of explanation, taking into
account that Auden considered that experience could be reduced to classifiable elements, as
a necessary preliminary to diagnosis and prescription.
• Tone of calm certainty and self-confidence.

His attention to commonly irrelevant detail mixed with high style create the effect of
defamiliarization. Examples: “Talking to Mice” (and more poems from Epistle to a Godson) deals
with a more or less plebeian theme but includes very complex vocabulary (¿?).
In creating the particular effect of his poems, syntax plays a very important role; e. g.
“Prime” in Horae Canonicae → the first stanza consists only of one long sentence, and it is full of
enjambments and middle pauses. The same poem written in prose would have a totally different
effect. Related to this, the stanza form Auden uses may vary depending on the poem (he worked
with many different types and does not have just one recurrent form).
Other literary devices → Alliteration (“Prime”), irony, symbol & metaphor.