Thinking Activity on Auden poem

Thinking Activity on W. H. Auden poem

Hello reader this blog is response blog on W. H. Auden. Poem given by Dr. Dilip Barad. 

English poet, playwright, critic, and librettist Wystan Hugh Auden exerted a major influence on the poetry of the 20th century. Auden grew up in Birmingham, England and was known for his extraordinary intellect and wit. His first book, Poems, was published in 1930 with the help of T.S. Eliot. Just before World War II broke out, Auden emigrated to the United States where he met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lifelong lover. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for The Age of Anxiety. Much of his poetry is concerned with moral issues and evidences a strong political, social, and psychological context. While the teachings of Marx and Freud weighed heavily in his early work, they later gave way to religious and spiritual influences. Some critics have called Auden an anti-Romantic—a poet of analytical clarity who sought for order, for universal patterns of human existence. Auden’s poetry is considered versatile and inventive, ranging from the tersely epigrammatic to book-length verse, and incorporating a vast range of scientific knowledge. Throughout his career, he collaborated with Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, and also frequently joined with Chester Kallman to create libretti for musical works by Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Today he is considered one of the most skilled and creative mid-20th century poets who regularly wrote in traditional rhyme and meter.

Auden's poems seems to be written in our time like Russian and Ukraine war and pandemic situation. 

There no more information about this point but as a reader I can find one article on Washington Post this is small information about that. 

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine parallels Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland in ways that aren’t small. A dictator’s claim to Lebensraum started with Sudetenland and Austria and then went cancerously to Poland. From there, we know what happened.

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W.H. Auden could not have foreseen the extent of the horror to come when he wrote “September 1, 1939” in the days following the Nazi invasion. Who knew then that Hitler’s move would lead to the deaths of over 75 million people, genocidal concentration camps and the ruin of Europe in the ensuing six years? Still, Auden’s poem brings the reader into one man’s fear as he freezes that fateful moment, and in the compressed, telescopic language that only poetry can create, the poet’s feeling that the world is spinning into disaster becomes the reader’s own.

“September 1, 1939,” opens with the news that Hitler has invaded Poland. 

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives:

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

The poem does what powerful poems can do: It fuses eloquent language with arresting images in clipped, rhythmic phrases. Auden’s terse lines are in iambic trimeter and handled with a deftness that makes for the memorable phrases that get stuck in the ear, always a passage to the brain. It’s no surprise that this poem has been quoted so much over the years. Published in the New Republic six weeks after it was written, it has been anthologized frequently and cited by writers, scholars and readers, including President Lyndon B. Johnson during his 1964 campaign. It’s one of those poems that has entered the popular imagination — rare for poems in our time. It came to prominence again after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and was read on NPR. When I watched Russian tanks on TV entering Ukraine and heard sound of explosion. 

Although it opens with deep personal emotion, “September 1, 1939,” moves to the political realm in three-beat lines that turn on a dime to capture the megalomania of the dictator. Hitler, Putin. Fill in the blank: “What huge imago made/A psychopathic god.”

The language and rhythmic torque call forth the history of an idea: “Exiled Thucydides knew/All that a speech can say/About Democracy/And what dictators do.”

Amid the news of violence and portent of disaster, Auden watches the quotidian world go on: “Faces along the bar/Cling to their average day:/The lights must never go out,/The music must always play.” And, when the day comes “From the conservative dark/Into the ethical life/The dense commuters come,/Repeating their morning vows;/“I will be true to the wife,/I’ll concentrate more on my work.”

Auden captures the unbearable contradiction between the necessity of going on as usual while being tugged by the urgency of catastrophe elsewhere. The tension is not unlike what many Americans and people around the world feel as Putin unleashes violence on Ukraine.

As a good ironist, the poet acknowledges his limitations — perhaps the limitations of all art — when he confesses “All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie.” But the poem does have the power to connect us to the moral urgency of a historical moment. Auden’s lines make readers feel part of the bigger whole, a collective sense of the species, even as things seem to be sliding out of control.

Auden found the last line of the penultimate stanza didactic and so redacted it in his later revision, but it remains the most famous line of the poem, a kind of secular spiritual epigram: “We must love one another or die.”

The final stanza is an appeal to resistance and the power of human community:

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

In these past few days, the Ukrainians’ resistance to Putin’s megalomaniacal and criminal acts of aggression has made urgent a question Auden’s poem implicitly asks: Who are we and what are our responsibilities to our fellow humans in times of violence and war? The final image also poses a question: What is an “affirming flame”? If poems, like all literary forms, are what Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living,” then “September 1, 1939,” challenges all of us to find a way to be an affirming flame in the face of the “unmentionable odour of death” that offends our February night.

W. B. Yeats memory the poem written by him The Second Coming is also describe War view. And poem Second Coming also discuss as pandemic view click 

As over contemporary time pandemic situation many people are died but people of now days they not make it serious topic as a war as a literature student i am seen many literary works describe war not easily find Spanish  Flu in literature I think in future their are many work related Russian and Ukraine war rarely find Corona related work. 

There is another point given by my teacher

Theme of the Lack of Acceptance of Homosexuality in Society.

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Morgan Walker: A Hidden Message: Auden’s Personal Protest in Time of War

You are here: Home » Morgan Walker: A Hidden Message: Auden’s Personal Protest in Time of War

W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” can be interpreted as having two messages regarding society. On the surface, the poem comments on how the dishonesty and manipulation of government can lead to war. The author uses this primary interpretation as a vessel to mask and deliver his underlying critique of homophobia. In order to create duality in interpretation of the poem, Auden uses codified language to conceal the underlying theme of the lack of acceptance of homosexuality in society. The poem creates metaphors, such as a contrast of light and dark and uses implications through historical figures and government to show the offense done to homosexuals. The two interpretations of the poem are able to coexist without impeding or contradicting one another. By setting up a historical scenario and then commenting on societal errors, Auden is able to effectively shift tones without harshly criticizing the audience on social injustices.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in England in 1907 and had two older brothers. Auden’s family moved around the country for various reasons, typically because of his father’s work. The first extremely significant event in Auden’s life that shows a major connection with his future profession in poetry was when Wystan was eight years old, he was sent to St. Edmund’s boarding school. While attending school he received what would be considered a traditional education given to English boys of upper classes. His level of studies and high education lead to receiving a scholarship to Oxford in which we was going to study in the natural sciences. While at the University, his tutor,  Nevill Coghill was extremely sympathetic to Auden’s youthful curiosity and helped to guide Auden into an English literature major (Farnan 34). These events set up the beginning of Auden’s future in poetry.

While at Oxford, Auden seemed to have feelings for fellow undergraduate men and these feelings had gone unexpressed. While at college, he tried to develop heterosexual traits through such things as psychoanalysis and celibacy (Bucknell 1). After graduating from college and Auden sought out to expand his education and gain freedom. He found this freedom in Berlin when he lived in the middle-class suburb of Nikolassee. While in Berlin, Auden began to experiment with his new found freedom through sexual activity (Farnan 36). In Berlin, Auden indulged himself in the relationships that he had been denied in college. He wrote to friends back home about male brothels and men who were available for money in the bars and around the neighborhood (Bucknell 1). Auden’s new life in Berlin began a process of self-examination that allowed him to understand his sexual nature. He later moved back to England, but frequently visited Berlin because he missed the lifestyle. After one of the visits in July 1930, Auden wrote six love poems in German that were inspired by the love affairs that he had in Berlin and the kind of man that he longed for. The poems are very direct and had a tone of melancholy, disillusioned, even cynical love and express such ideas as selfish love, and that it is short and sometimes brutish (Bucknell 1). They were written in such a fashion and in a foreign language because Auden never expected them to be published. He felt that by writing them in a foreign language, it allowed him to disguise certain aspects in case others tried to read it, which freed him to speak more openly on the difficult theme of love (Bucknell 2). Auden even kept track of many of his feelings and experiences in a journal that he kept in which he stated such things as how his guilt about his homosexuality drove him to search for new lovers (Faran 38).

The fact that Auden met and fell in love with Kallman in 1939, the same year that he wrote “September 1, 1939,” gives some inkling that the subject matter of the poem could have deep seeded roots in Auden’s personal feelings about love particularly coupled with fact that some of Auden’s previous poems have been suggested as having dual interpretations. In the article “’But Who Would Get It?’: Auden and the Codes of Poetry and Desire,” Richard Bozorth examines a passage from “The Temple,” in which a character Stephen cries out “Destroy this temple.” Bozorth argues that the line would mean very little to readers who are unaware that “the temple” is Spender’s image for the eroticized male body. Bozorth believes that “the line divides readers by way of privileged knowledge” (Bozorth 712). Bozorth goes on to give another example from the same work in which he argues that the lines are nor only cryptic but encrypted and contain code-names that are most likely only known to inside readership in which only those close to Auden would understand the references. Bozorth believes that the codes that Auden creates quite often “invoke insider knowledge about homosexuality (Bozorth 712). In another one of  Auden’s poems, “As I walked out one evening,” the lines “You shall love your crooked neighbour/With your crooked heart” comment on the unfaithfulness of all lovers. However, Bozorth suggests that because “crookedness” is one of Auden’s favorite tropes for homosexuality, it is very likely that Auden is declaring the transience of gay love (Bozorth 712). Auden finds ways to create duality in his work so that he can bring a deep meaning to multiple groups of people. Since Auden has a personal connection with the homosexual community it would make sense that he is creating a second meaning behind his work that speaks to homosexuals. By creating a second meaning to his work, homosexuals are able to connect with his poetry and understand it on a deeper Read more in this article