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W.H. AUDEN
Learning about W.H. Auden and haveing the opportunity to read and study some of his works, was truley enlightening.
Through our Modern British Poetry class, we read some of the following poems by Auden: "Miss Gee," "Oxford," "In Memory
of Yeats," "September 1, 1939," etc. I really enjoyed reading the poem about "Miss Gee." For a poet
to write such a powerful poem about a lonely women, who seems to be full of depression, which essentially leads her to cancer,
and is finally disected by a group of Oxford students at the end of the poem. I just felt that Auden wrote some very
powerful poems that played on the emotions of society. He was a really great author to learn about.
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Auden wrote a many works of criticism and essays as well as co-authoring some drama with his friend Christopher Isherwood.
However, Auden is probably most famous for his poetry. Auden was partly responsible for re-introducing Anglo-Saxon accentual
meter to English poetry, particularly during the 1930s. "An area of controversy is the extent to which Auden reworked
poems in successive publications, and dropped several of his best-known poems from collected editions because he no longer
felt they were honest or accurate." Mendelson discusses this in his introduction to Auden's Selected Poems, and felt
that this was truely a serious belief Auden had in the power and importance of poetry. The Selected Poems include some poetry
and verse that Auden rejected, and even some earlier versions of his poetry which he later revised.
From 1921 Auden often
stayed at his parents' cottage near Keswick in Cumbria, and some forty of the poems of the 1920s and 1930s and two influential
plays "Paid on Both Sides" and "The Dog Beneath the Skin" are set in the North Pennines.
Auden was
a poet who was noted for his instinct and experimentation with tradition.
Earlier before he turned to Anglicanism Auden
took an active interest in left-wing political controversies of his day and some of his greatest work reflects these concerns,
such as "Spain", a poem on the Spanish Civil War, and "September 1, 1939", on the outbreak of World War
II; both poems were later repudiated by Auden and excluded from his Collected Poems. Auden's ironic love poem "Funeral
Blues," was read in the 1994 film "Four Weddings and a Funeral." Before this, Auden's work was famously used
in the GPO Film Unit's documentary film Night Mail, for which he wrote a verse commentary.
Auden was a frequent correspondent
and longtime friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, who died three weeks before Auden. He was among the most prominent early critics to
praise The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter, "I am... very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His
support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters
from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it."
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Favorite Links
Poems By W.H. Auden
W.H. Auden
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Distinguishing between a poem written by Auden and a poem written by T.S. Eliot, is like night and day. T.S. Eliot
was way over my head, however, Auden's work I could relate to more. He wrote very powerful verses without making it
so difficult to interpret and I think that is probably why I enjoy his poetry so much.
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