3/10/06 - English Literature - Auden

• Authorship and interpretation: biographical reading
• Biographical reading and Auden
• Auden, English and American.

Biography gives a framework for interpretation of a piece of work, e.g. feminist literature, sexuality of literature.

Should Auden's work be interpreted in terms of his homosexuality? Does his work depict secrecy and other things associated with homosexuality?

Influential in 1930s, came to poetic maturity after modernist explosion. 'Auden generation'. His influence complicated in 1939, when he moved to America. Some believe it was cowardice of war, abandoning; some believe he was escaping merely constriction for freedom, liberty in New York. So should his work be categorised into 'English' and American' Auden? Detecting stylistic changes. Work reflecting life?

Writing about authorship 1:
Musee des Beaux Arts.
Human position - narrative and experience
Artist's eye: synoptic vision of human position
Rhythm, diction and meaning
Poet and artist: performing and describing, old and new masters.

Euphrastic poem - Musee des Beaux Arts. Art about art. About the capacities that are taken about events. 'Human position'. Brueghel's Icarus. Tragic events take place inc ontext, it may be important for those who are suffering but not to outsiders. Seen from different perspectives. Even important events take place in different perspectives. Instead of focusing on point of view of sufferer, the painting depicts the event from the point of view of a ploughman and ship crew. Concern with artist's eye: it is human, concerned, yet in the hands of the Old Masters, other people's point of view can be taken. So the artist is synoptic. Suffering belongs to person yet does not provoke universal sympathy. No one vision crowds out all others, or make others subordinate. Artist looks in on humans, separated from them. Poem endows paintings with capacity to invest in human condition.

Rhythm - 4th fourth. List. Indifferently unstressed. Goes 'dully along'. Indifference indicated metrically in the poem.

Diction. References to elevated language, theology. Mixed with ordinary language, "doggy life".

Suggests art's involvement in human interests. Art can offer a view beyond human, while humans stumble on with life too busy to think about this. So poem suggests author's life is separate from his art.

Writing about authorship 2:
In Memory of W. B. Yeats.
Section 1: poets and poetry: the relation of author and work.
Section 2: poetry and survival: who or what lives? How? What can it do?
Section 3: poetry and redemption: the affirmation of the negative.

Different stanza form, metric.

1) Focused on life and work. Invocation of world responding to an event. Opposes first poem, world not indifferent to death.

2) Poet's life resembles public world. "Provinces of body", "Squares of his mind."

But interrogates theory that world changes after a death. Focuses on insignificant rather than significant: poems not informed of author's death. As if poems and author had separate lives. "He becomes his admirers."

Poet becomes "scattered" across the world. All his paper given over. His words are all on paper, his entrance is on paper. "Guts", digested. Consumed by the living. His words are then "modified".

It is a meditation on the relationship of poet and work.

But also he survives in some way. He is a remnant, his work given over to readers. "Modified", i.e. survives, reworked. Not destroyed. What? How? "Poetry makes nothing happen." So poetry does make something happen... "nothing." Poetry creates something. Power, yet undermining. "It survives", but implies barely living, clinging, as well as triumph. It survives because it's not important, no one tampers with it, because it is disconnected, no one cares.

3) Ritualistic moment. Reciting over coffin? Incantation, prayer. Rhythm. Alternatively stress and unstress. Insistent. "Irish vessel ... emptied of its poetry." Possible other purpose for poetry. Poets live by their work? But language lives by poets, not vice versa. So writers merely vehicle for presence of language.

Further attempts to read poetry. Power, efficacy, involvement.