People, politics and the poetry of W.H.Auden

PEOPLE, POLITICS AND THE POETRY OF W.H. AUDENLISA EDWARDS ETA CONFERENCE 2015 Twitter: @raisingxplorers

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ETA 2015 - LISA EDWARDS

REPRESENTATION AND TEXT▸ Representations of events,

personalities, situations

▸ Relationship between representation and meaning

▸ Evaluate how medium, form, perspective and language influence meaning

▸ Textual forms and media of production offer different perspectives


REPRESENTING PEOPLE AND POLITICS▸ Explore and evaluate different

representations of people and politics

▸ Ways in which texts represent individual, shared or competing political perspectives, ideas, events or situations

▸ Representations of people's political motivations and actions

▸ Impact of political acts on individual lives or society more broadly


DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

▸ How do political workings and decisions affect people? Give some current examples.

▸ What power do the 'people' have in politics? Give some examples of how individuals can be powerful, and powerless, in the political process.

▸ Does our political system work? Why or why not?

DEFINING POLITICSActivities associated with governance, especially the debate between parties having power.

- Oxford Dictionary


POLITICAL CARTOONS

▸ Political perspectives, ideas, events, situations?

▸ Individual? Shared? Competing?

▸ Impact of political acts on individuals/society?

▸ Political motivations? Actions?

OF THE MANY DEFINITIONS OF POETRY, THE SIMPLEST IS STILL

THE BEST: 'MEMORABLE SPEECH'.

W. H. Auden 1935


AUDEN'S POETRY

AUDEN AND HIS POETRY: CRITICAL RESPONSES▸ Unremitting critic of his time

▸ Verbal and imagistic ferocity

▸ Rhetorical splendour

▸ Sings from a resonant heart

▸ Harbinger of 'The New Generation' of English poets

▸ Captured changing moods of the time in luminous images and magical phrases

▸ Expressing sentiments often decidedly political


AUDEN AND HIS POETRY: CRITICAL RESPONSES▸ Distinctive personal timbre, a

vulnerable embattled self

▸ Mould-breaker

▸ Uncrowned laureate of the age

▸ Extremely difficult to measure up or confine

▸ An obscure, difficult, personal writer

▸ The first "modern" poet in the dominant and ubiquitous unease at the heart of his poetry - Larkin

▸ An American poet



AUDEN'S BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

▸ 1907-1973

▸ Grew up in Birmingham, in northern England

▸ Received scholarship to Oxford for science/engineering

▸ First collection, Poems, published in 1930 with help of T.S. Eliot

▸ Emigrated to the U.S. in 1939 just before outbreak of WWII

▸ Poet Chester Kallman lifelong partner

▸ Marx and Freud heavily influenced early work; later religious and spiritual influences

▸ "Antiromantic" - analytical clarity to poems, seeking order


AUDEN'S POLITICS

▸ "Auden has been accused of changing ideas as often as men changed hats, as though he didn't believe in anything, or was fascinated by politics and psychology as part of a voracious quest that would satisfy him long enough to write a poem. Once the poem was written he either jettisoned the structure or tacked on a new idea." John Lucas - 'Cambridge Companion to Auden'


AUDEN'S EARLY POLITICS▸ Auden indicted a disintegrating social and economic

system ripe for fascism 'O what is that sound?'

▸ Sympathiser with the left, but never a party member

▸ In his criticism of Franco's fascist forces in Spanish Civil war: "I am not one of those who believe that poetry need or even should be directly political, but in a critical period such as ours, I do believe that the poet must have direct knowledge of the major political events. I shall probably be a bloody bad soldier but how can I speak to/for them without becoming one?" - Auden (went to Spain Jan-Mar 1937) 'Spain'

▸ Wrote 'September 1, 1939' as Germany invaded Poland


AUDEN'S LATER POLITICS: 'NEW YEAR LETTER' - JANUARY 1 1940

▸ Few of the artists who round about 1931 began to take up politics as an exciting new subject to write about, had the faintest idea what they were letting themselves in for. They have been carried along on a wave which is travelling too fast to let them think what they are doing or where they are going. But if they are neither to ruin themselves or harm the political causes in which they believe, they must stop and consider their position again. Their follies of the last eight years will provide them with plenty of food for thought.


'NEW YEAR LETTER'

▸ If one reviews the political activity of the world’s intellectuals during the past eight years, if one counts up all the letters to the papers which they have signed, all the platforms on which they have spoken, all the congresses they have attended, one is compelled to admit that their combined effect, apart from the money they have helped to raise for humanitarian purposes (and one must not belittle the value of that) has been nil. As far as the course of political events is concerned they might just as well have done nothing. As regards their own work, a few have profited, but how few.


AUDEN AND POLITICS▸ "One can regard [Auden's] legacy as a re-envisioning of the

poet’s social role. Auden revived the art of civic poetry in the Horatian mode: asserting the poet’s right to express himself or herself as an individual, to speak apart from rather than for the collective. Civic poetry has typically also involved a rejection of radicalism. It is political, therefore, mainly in the Aristotelian sense of being concerned with the relationship between public and private life in general terms. Concern, however, does not imply activism but rather a stable sense of citizenship in which private needs are balanced against public affairs" - Robert Huddleston, Boston Review, 'Poetry makes nothing happen' Feb 2015


'POLITICAL' PERSPECTIVES▸ Collision between private and public

▸ Inner world of the personal and the outer world of the political

▸ Competing perspectives of control

▸ The impact of the politics of war on the individual and society

▸ The individual's lack of control when faced with dominant politics and ideology

▸ Political decisions impact individuals and societies


FORM

▸ "A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." Auden

▸ Varied form: ballad, ode, lyric, meditation, elegy, satire, epitaph

▸ "In his verse, Auden can argue, reflect, joke, gossip, sing, analyse, lecture, hector, and simply talk; he can sound, at will, like a psychologist on a political platform, like a theologian at a party, or like a geologist in love; he can give dignity and authority to nonsensical theories, and make newspaper headlines sound both true and melodious." - Barbara Everett


STYLE▸ On Auden's 1930s poetry: "The

omission of articles, demonstrative adjectives, subjects, conjunctions, relative pronouns, auxiliary verbs - form a language of extremity and urgency. Like telegraphese it has time and patience for only the most important words." - Robert Bloom

▸ "In the course of his career he has demonstrated impressive facility in speaking through any sort of dramatic persona; accordingly, the choice of an intimate, personal tone does not imply the direct self-expression of the poet." - John G. Blair

▸ "The influence of music on Auden's verse has always been salient: even his worst lines often 'sound' impressive." - Jeremy Robson


'O WHAT IS THAT SOUND WHICH SO THRILLS THE EAR?' 1932

▸ Ballad form - simple narrative, climactic event viewed from a personal perspective

▸ Dramatic duologue - question and response - female and male?

▸ Soldiers represented as invaders, not protectors - military as a political tool

▸ Ambiguous setting - time and place - prophetic

▸ Male punished for political dissent?

▸ Impact of public power on private life/love

'The Death of Major Peirson' John Singleton Copley


O WHAT IS THAT SOUND WHICH SO THRILLS THE EAR?

"Oh what is that sound which so thrills the ear Down in the valley drumming, drumming? Only the scarlet soldiers, dear, The soldiers coming."

Perhaps a change in orders, dear; Why are you kneeling?

O it's broken the lock and splintered the door, O it's the gate where they're turning, turning; Their feet are heavy on the floor And their eyes are burning.

▸ Fragility of human bonds when faced with the intrusion of state forces - European context

▸ Mechanical advance of soldiers, juxtaposition Stanza 2 to Stanza 9

▸ Question and response changing tone

▸ Note the verbs, action through dialogue

▸ Auditory and visual imagery

▸ Exclamation, confusion of why the personal must be dominated by the political


SPAIN▸ Written in 1937 after Auden visited Spain,

originally as a pamphlet.

▸ Later, repudiated it as 'dishonest'

▸ Tripartite structure - Spain's great achievements of the past; the destruction of the present; the possibility of the future

▸ The politics of war impact the lives of individuals and have widespread impact "But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."

▸ Dominant politics can silence individuals "As the poet whispers, startled among the pines"


SPAIN▸ Dense, powerful imagery

▸ Anaphora

▸ Voices of the people - the poet, the investigator (scientist), the poor

▸ "Our day is our loss, O show us History the operator, the Organiser, Time the refreshing river." Rich figurative language of hope to cleanse the destruction

▸ "Today the fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting."

▸ But ends in the fierce present "The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day."

▸ First person collective pronouns - mankind suffers together


EPITAPH ON A TYRANT - JANUARY 1939

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.


IN MEMORY OF W.B. YEATS

▸ Auden honours the ode/elegy form, and W.B. Yeats 1939

▸ Three-part structure

▸ Section I: Archetypal figurative language linking winter to death; plosive alliteration of "dead", "deserted", "disfigured", "dark" - the wintry earth itself mourns the loss of Yeats, use of geographic metaphors as "the provinces of his body revolted" and "silence invaded the suburbs". "He became his admirers."

"The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living."

▸ Section II: despite his physical demise, Yeats lives on in his poetry.

▸ "For poetry makes nothing happen; it survives /In the valley of its saying."

‣ The limited impact of the personal on the public - poetry itself cannot bring political change

‣ As beautiful as Yeats' political poems were (Easter 1916) they didn't bring change

‣ Section III is beautifully formal and rhetorical. Yet it's a biting indictment of society's misplaced values, "intolerant of the brave and innocent" yet "worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives". Auden is critical of Kipling and Claudel.

‣ The politics of the time are referenced "In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark."


THE UNKNOWN CITIZEN (1939)▸ Satirical elegy to 'Modern Man' noted only

by his number in the subtitle, 'Js/07/m/378'

▸ Dedicatory information, "This Marble Monument is Erected by the State" - suggests someone of importance

▸ Begins with tone of adulatory testimony, yet the content reported on in bureaucratic terms is anything but praiseworthy - satire, mock elegy - impersonal third person officialese

▸ Cumulation of orthodox behaviours - Auden criticises blind conformity to the state and modern consumerist behaviour

▸ "He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be / One against whom there was no official complaint"

▸ "And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way... And had everything necessary to Modern Man."

▸ Capitalisation indicates ironic bureaucratic importance

▸ "Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: / Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard."


THE UNKNOWN CITIZEN

▸ Auden warns of blind acceptance of public expectations - the loss of the individual to conform with the state

▸ The political here is not just the government, but its bureaucracy, and the consumerism as a tool of economic, and thus political control

▸ There is no longer a collision between private and public - the public world has consumed the private


SEPTEMBER 1, 1939▸ The persona lyrically meditates on

the state of the world on the day of Hitler's invasion of Poland

▸ First person meditation of the 'low dishonest decade' of the 1930s, with 'waves of anger and fear // Obsessing our private lives'. Here the impact of the public on the private. Political machinations have wide-reaching emotional impacts.

▸ 'Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.' - Allusion to Hitler; 'Linz', 'huge imago'

▸ Rich historical allusion- 'Thucydides knew / All that speech can say / About Democracy, / And what dictators do'. Athenian father of political realism - state and individuals dominated by fear and self-interest - Sparta versus Athens. War is not new. Human nature

▸ Return to the bar, 'Faces along the bar / Cling to their average day... Lost in a haunted wood, / Children afraid of the night' - imagery, verb choices, metaphor


SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

"For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone."

"There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die"


SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 - POLITICS▸ Political actions impact individuals and

societies on a global scale

▸ Individuals can't be separated from politics - politicians ARE people

▸ Personal experiences affect public life

▸ War is inevitable and unavoidable - humans crave power

▸ Lack of engagement in politics by the people - focus on consumer culture

▸ Connecting to others most important - the private drives the public at the most basic level


THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (1952)

▸ Uses an episode from Homer's Iliad to meditate on the modern world - violence and brutality

▸ Goddess Thetis looks over the shoulder of Hephaestos, the god of fire and metal working, as he makes a shield for Achilles

▸ Classical imagery of "vines and olive trees, / marble and well-governed cities" has been replaced with "artificial wilderness / And a sky like lead."


THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES▸ Contrast the most important rhetorical

device - what should be contrasted with what is

▸ This juxtaposition emphasised by the two different stanza forms.

▸ As Thetis looks over Hephaestos' shoulder the reader's gaze in ancient Greece. Short, eight three-stress lines.

▸ Modern scenes in seven-line form rime royal - iambic pentameter, ababbcc - contrast is striking visually and aurally - powerful imagery of destruction and suffering


THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES▸ Irony in that Thetis would expect a

shield, an instrument of war, to be a thing of beauty, decorated with peaceful scenes

"Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood An unintelligible multitude, A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign."

‣ Achilles as a metaphor for modern politics - doomed - no peace can come from the politics of war - even the strong fall


MODELLING RELATED TEXTS▸ "The Pedestrian" - short story by Ray

Bradbury

▸ "30% (Women and Politics in Sierra Leone)" - short film by Anna Cady and Em Cooper

▸ "Guernica" - painting by Pablo Picasso

▸ "V for Vendetta" - film by James McTeigue

▸ "I met the walrus" - short film/animation by John Raskin

▸ Animal Farm by George Orwell

PABLO PICASSO: GUERNICA (1937)

ETA 2015 LISA EDWARDS

COMMON HURDLES

▸ Students not exploring texts as representations of the relationships between people and politics

▸ Students writing too generally about politics affecting people

▸ Instead, focus on rubric terms:

1. Political perspectives, ideas, events, situations, motivations, actions, individual, shared, competing

2. War is politics; politics is war

3. Political action of civil war

4. Personal engagement in political process

5. Where the private world and public world of politics collide

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People, politics and the poetry of W.H.Auden

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