W.H. Auden's Theories of Poetry

Poets draw upon life experiences and intellectual influences in developing their work, with some such influences being conscious and others unconscious but perceptible. W.H. Auden was a very conscious poet, a theorist as well as a poet, and one who understood the influences shaping his poetry and who made deliberate use of them to convey his themes and emotional impact. An examination of Auden's poetry and his theories of poetry shows that he was influenced by strong intellectual currents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that he consciously used the fact and power of ideology as he made use of the developing existentialism of S�ren Kierkegaard and the social and political writings of Marx and other Communist thinkers to convey his particular notions of order.

In a famous lecture on poetry delivered by Auden at Oxford, he made an important distinction between the sacred and the profane that illuminates his poetry. He defines sacred beings and events as those that arouse involuntary awe in the observer, that seem overwhelmingly significant even if the reasons for this are too deep for the observer to analyze. Everything else is defined as profane. There is nothing religious in this distinction in spite of the terminology, and atheists have their sacred beings just as do Christians. Analyzing Auden's poetry means to discern what is sacred to him, what sorts of encounters are sacred and inspire awe in the poet.

Auden himself served as sacred to a generation

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en as they seem to convey Marxist ideas. In the "commentary" section of "In Time of War," Auden comments on the state of modern humanity and the possibilities as well as the hindrances to further human development: Never before was the Intelligence so fertile, The Heart more stunted. The human field became Hostile to brotherhood and feeling like a forest. The advent of machines made this situation worse, and capitalism was another culprit. The result was a feeling of guilt, making it more possible for those with base motives to make their plea and gain their converts: Man can have Unity if Man will give up Freedom. The state is real, the Individual is wicked. Violence shall synchronize your movements like a tune. Auden embodied in this poem his sense of the world during this period of transition in his thinking and in reference to the war he is writing about: This particular war calls up all human failures, which are all, essentially, failures to achieve the truly human. We are, says Auden in a brilliant capsule survey of history, in the epoch of the third great disappointment: the first was Classical civilization; the second, the Middle Ages; and the third our own dualism between mind and body, isolation of the self i

Category: Literature - W