Theories of Poetry, By W.H. Auden

" At the same date, thither was a backlash against Auden when governmentally oriented critics saw that Auden was not what they wanted him to be, leading to a bitter reaction that became charge more bitter when he emigrated to the United States and started writing spiritual poetry. In the 1930s, though, Auden's work was infused with the theme of the power of ideology to cipher new subjects and to shape the way those subjects order the world:

Auden quotes with cheering Erikson's extended definition of ideology as, not just consciously held beliefs and convictions, or the propaganda which sustains them, but as an "unconscious tendency key religious and scientific as well as political thought: the tendency at a given time to make facts amenable to ideas, and ideas to facts, in order to create a world image convincing enough to support the joint and the individual sense of identity."

The red ink perspective is strong in Auden's early work, and his disillusionment with Marxism mirrored that of many intellectuals of his age and would as well be expressed in his poetry. The Marxist view indeed was only one of several that infused Auden's work, and Auden was never wholeheartedly apply to it. His seeming dedication to it indeed a great deal seemed forced and absurd to readers, though there have been both(prenominal) who insisted on comprehend his Marxism as central and who try to read the early A

The one poem of Auden's that is avowedly Marxist in orientation is his "In Time of War," the sonnet chronological succession in Journey to a War. Most of his poems from this period are not really Marxist at all, though some have been identified as such, and rather they are unremarkably mixed with deliberate or inadvertent skepticism dismantle as they seem to convey Marxist ideas.

In the " interpretation" section of "In Time of War," Auden comments on the state of new(a) pityingity and the possibilities as well as the hindrances to further human development:

Kierkegaard would remain an influence over Auden after 1940, and the fullest human face of this made by Auden was in the 1952 preface he wrote to a volume of selections from Kierkegaard. In this preface, Auden drew a parallel amongst Kierkegaard and Cardinal Newman as the groovy preachers to a secularized society which was motionlessness officially Christian. Auden says that Kierkegaard's polemic moves in two directions at once, externally against bourgeois Protestantism, and inwardly against his receive suffering. In Auden's new poems, the sort was clear from the beginning:

Wright, George T. W.H. Auden. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

Never before was the learning so fertile,

Ironically, as he deplores the mechanization of modern society, his own poems become more removed from ordinary sensuous existence. Cities and great men, parading before him, submit to his examination: but too often the life they must once have possessed is decreased to an idea.

There was not one which knew that it was dying

No one of them was adapted of lying,

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