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WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN (1907-1973) - Coggle Diagram
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN (1907-1973)
LIFE
born in York from Anglican parents
while studying at Oxford he became the leader of the
Oxford poets
deeply committed to social issues, he worked for the London strikers in 1926, witnessed the rise of Nazism in Berlin and served as ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War. In 1933 he also expressed solidarity with the Jews persecuted by Hitles
in 1935 he married Erika, Thomas Mann's daughter, only to provide her with a British passport to escape from the Nazi Germany
Because of his homosexuality, seen as a criminal offence in Britain, he moved to New York and began teaching
he returned to the Anglican faith
1946 became a USA citizen
1956 elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford
died for a heart attack after a poetry reading in Vienna in 1973
WORKS
1940
Another time
his most famous poems
title indicating the beginning of his exile
marked the TURN from POLITICAL towards ETHICAL concerns
3 sections
Lighter Poems
comic tone
Occasional Poems
celebration of the deaths of Freud and Yeats
interpretation of historical events (German invasion of Poland)
People and places
relationship between man and nature
1941
New Year Letter
1944
For the time being
1947
The age of anxiety
difficult verse forms, religious reaffirmation
INFLUENCES
Freud - psychological models in relations to the customs of a society
Marx - the engagement of the individual with history
ATTITUDES
Withdrawal from political commitment after his move to America
disillusionment with political events
the Moscow purge trials
the Soviet-German non-aggression pact
the Republican defeat in Spain
the improvement must begin within the self
freed from the burden of social responsibility
THEMES
love
modern suffering
religious doubt
Musée des beaux arts
written in Brussels where he saw Bruegehl's painting
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
a notion of human nature and suffering
'About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters'
death
Funeral blues
'Stop all the clocks.../for nothing now can ever come to any good'
recited in the film
Four weddings and a funeral
(1994)
politics, citizenship
The unknown citizen
To JS/07... this marble monument is erected by the state. / He was found by the Bureau of Statistics../ we should certainly have heard'
Auden criticises how democracy, during the Great Depression, may turn into a dictatorship (also due to social security programmes)
Refugee blues
'Say this city has ten million souls'....my dear, yet there's no place for us'
a modified blues (originally used to reflect the sadness of the Afro-americans) to deal with the escape of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany
horrors of war and totalitarianism
September 1, 1939
the quest
English period:
for a new society and a new self
American period:
for a new life
STYLE
experimental
free verse, rhyme, sonnets, odes, ballads, songs
starting
in medias res