Auden

W.H. Auden, perhaps one of the most renowned poets of the 20th century, was an intellectual in constant search for understanding of the world in which he lived. Time after time, whether it was during his days of study at Oxford University or amidst his return to an absolute, Christian frame of mind as a middle-aged man, Auden, vacillated back and forth between opposite poles of viewpoint. Auden questioned institutionalized ideas from the start and for a good part of his childhood rejected the idea of religion in full (though he still went to church to soak in the fiery orations), only to later accept Christianity’s doctrines as a middle-aged man. One thing that remained consistent, though, in Auden was his methodology of thinking – he continually involved himself in critical thought, in barefaced attempt to make sense of his life. Though this mode of philosophy did pave the way to further intellect – like any big thinker – Auden was often left still scratching his head. His confusion, most likely overlapping with his romantic feelings for the same sex, undeniably coincided with his inclination to begin writing poetry. Concerned with knowledge, practice, and understanding, Auden persistently psychoanalyzed himself and others,

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Duchene later tells that Auden was really just experiencing an exaggerated form of what most males in their twenties experience – that of the isolated, self-contained, self-enclosed, self-hating individual. ” Auden has taken a scene from the countryside by an industrial city (perhaps Birmingham) and has found in it a personal vision of a world and a psyche that is in the final stages of life, merely awaiting a catastrophic destruction. His quest can be revered as a change – a search for understanding of oneself in one’s surroundings. The scene, as Everett notes, has an “undeniable ‘glamour’ and mystery, and its language is heroic; Auden the ‘Maker,’ is in love with the world he has made, which has taken on an essential, ‘Utopian’ innocence…” (10). Auden’s immediate connection with Medley provided him a sense of satisfaction, for in talking with Medley he was not only able to sate his inner desire for a close, male-to-male relationship (something he never had with his father), but on a straightforward level, he also was able to relate with another classmate on topics of interest.

Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall,

They wake no sleeper; you may hear the wind

Arriving driven from the ignorant sea

To hurt itself on pane, on bark of elm

Where sap unbaffled rises, being spring;

But seldom this. Francois Duchene points out that Nazism was an aberration or nervous breakdown of liberal society peculiar to a period in which the spiritual values and material problems of the capitalist world were disastrously out of phase (95).

The aforementioned is not to say that Auden’s blossoming homosexuality propelled him to write poetry; rather, it is to say that Auden’s innate aptitude for listening to his emotions and inner drives allowed him to realize his potential in poetry.

Around this time in Auden’s life, he had already discovered T. It is never sated, though it is eventually exhausted, or even perverted into hate, not the least of which may be self – and this is exactly what Auden was enduring at this point in his life: a hunt for understanding of himself and the concept of love, whether it be self-love or selfless love – and most of the time he came up empty-handed. Auden’s fluctuation from one end of belief to the other was evident from the beginning, and it does little more than show he was a man for whom the idea of understanding oneself was not easily attainable. At this time, though Auden’s vision of himself and what he would be was still a bit blurry, Auden wrote to himself:

Kicking a little stone, he turned to me

And said, ‘Tell me, do you write poetry?’

I never had, and said so, but I knew

That very moment what I wished to do. Auden learned to analyze his own “Waste Land,” or land “cut off,” which he found in England around him, an England that was purportedly an antithesis to the “Good Place. The narrator here has clarified his confusion of love (something which Auden always strived to do), and is now secure in the knowledge that he need never, and can never, claim the Italy he sees as his own: the ‘gothic North’ and the ‘sunburnt otherwhere’ of the South are finally irreconcilable, just like Auden’s ideas of reality and poetry, the ethical and the aesthetic. An argument ensued, and to soften what Medley feared might become a serious breach in their relationship, he paused and asked Auden if he wrote poetry, confessing by way of exchange that he did – and Auden suggested he might do so.

Approximate Word count = 3836
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page double spaced)

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