Auden and Musee des Beaux Arts (1938)

Pieter Breughel: The Fall of Icarus

We all know the story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun with his waxen wings and fell to his death. Now Auden knew how many are indifferent to the plight of Icarus, and defines it in his poem 'Musee des Beaux Arts'.
This is a poem about indifference of the self, involving the discourse of painting and expressing hopelessness of inadequacy of beliefs of the public and political effects of making a work of art. Claiming that artists have no powers of resistance.
Written at the borders of nazism, Auden uses the story of Icarus to symbolize the sense of what goes on in 1935, who is preoccupied with the horrors of Nazism and who gently turns away.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden

Brief overview:

• Born in England in a professional middle class family
• Took stages to try and 'cure' himself of his homosexuality, but later accepted this as a fact
• Went to Oxford to study the sciences but changed to Literature in his 2nd year (science continued to occupy him throughout his life)
• Auden had many hobbies including being open to mass media of his time (cinema), writer of comic verse, playwright and a photographer, publishing his photos in his own travel journals.
• Early poems (1920s-1930s) alternated between modernist styles and the fluent and more traditional
• His later poems, conform to the avant garde qualities that Peter Burger writes of, but remain in modernist form.
• September 1, 1939 is a contemporary poem that high modernists (like Yeats) were unable to achieve, and it almosts exists as a proto postmodern poem.

The date marks the day that Germany and Russia invaded Poland, and three days before Britain entered the 2nd World War.
At the time of writing, Auden had met his long term partner, and so here the pschoanalytical understanding of the 'impossibility of being loved' that preoccupied him, is negated.

'"September 1, 1939" is split into nine, eleven lined, stanzas with no set rhyme scheme or exact meter. For the most part shifts occur randomly although one can group them to certain degrees though it would be best, in one's opinion, to absorb the allusion-based meanings individually for yes they are ever-so deep. The first two stanzas seem to make reference to the German invasion of Poland; the third and forth stanzas takes a shot at democratically industrialized man; stanzas five and six touch on the concept of sin; surprisingly the seventh, eighth and ninth stanzas bring out the strongest messages which are rather hopeful if not optimistic. Occasionally one meets a rhyme but they are inconsistent in one's eyes and not truly compelling if one suggested they pushed the overall meaning of the work.'
This extract describes the general form of the poem. [ref. an-analysis-w-h-audens-september-1-1939-782359]

One of my favourite of Auedens poems is "Spain" (1937)
Within this he produces a general account of World History, beginning with China, and carries this forward through the 26 following (four line) stanzas.
Somewhere about half way through, the temporal frame shifts, where he has begun the first and last line in each stanza repeating the word 'Yesterday', we caan observe a shift in time- from Yesterday, to today and finally to 'now'. It is the latter that ignites me the most, in particular the second to last stanza: I believe this is still very viable in todays society, on this level there is not much that has changed, just stagnent entertainment and the hope of occupying oneself with a menial task.


To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.



After the 1940's, this poem was no longer allowed to be printed (for a time), as they believed it had moral fault, yet I see it as an antedote to the pessimism in the Avant Garde of the 1920s-30s. It was originally produced in Pamphlet form, in order for Auden to raise money.

Taken from 'Auden's Call to Arms: ‘Spain’ and Psychoanalysis.  John Farrell'
http://the-age-of-anxiety.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/w-h-auden-spain-translation-and.html

'W. H. Auden occupied a central piece in the consciousness of the British left in the 1930s not because he was a political poet in any ordinary sense but because he was a persuasive diagnostician of a diseased civilization. There was also, of course, a touch of the prophet in the early Auden, hinting at hidden, unconscious forces beneath the surface of events. These forces could be either menacing or potentially liberating, and part of the appeal of Auden's early poetry was the process of self-exploration and self-diagnosis taking place in contact with larger, deeper energies and powers – the unconscious of an expanded territory. With the Spanish crisis of 1937, however, Auden's stance altered in an important way. He was no longer satisfied with waiting for a ‘change of heart’; it was time to assume responsibility and take personal action. But this decision could only be a first step. To manage such a transition as a poet, Auden would have to discover new resources of poetic form, take up a different stance towards his audience, and find the proper grounds of intellectual appeal for the new kind of argument he wished to make. And, since psychoanalysis had provided much of the intellectual underpinning, or we might even say the logic, of Auden's poetry, Auden would now have to adapt what was explicitly an anti-political mode of thought to political uses. His partial success is testimony to the poet's enormous ingenuity and talent, and to his intellectual seriousness, but also to the inherent moral and political limitations of psychoanalytic thinking.'

Read by Ron Burgundy- from Youtube

Useful info from Alistair about Auden

 You'll find on Box of Broadcasts three very useful programmes about Auden. The first is a documentary - 'Tell Me the Truth About Love' (BBC 4 2009) which is a very fine audi-visual biography of Auden; the second is a drama-documentary:'The Addictions of Sin' (BBC 2 2004) which frames Auden through his re-conversion to Christianity in 1941 which made him reject the political and moral positions he had held in the 1930s. The third is a drama - Christopher and His Kind (BB2 2011) - which tells the story of the time spent in Berlin by Christopher Isherwood and W.H.Auden. They were there in the dying years of the Weimar Republic as the Nazi movement is gaining ground. It is very well done, not least by the very tall Matt Smith (Dr Who) as Isherwood who was very short. It captures well the sexual libertinism of the period - Isherwood and Auden were in Berlin for the easy access to hard-up gay young men; but Auden was influenced by the art and culture of the Weimar period, not
least by the ideas of Brecht. It is well worth watching because it also helps us to understand the period in Europe in which Auden was writing. Auden and Isherwood and other post-war writers are much more international and mobile than their pre-war counterparts and they lived much more on the edges of society, in part because they were gay, in part because they were interested in radical politics. 

You can access Box of Broadcast by simply googling Box of Broadcasts- you then enter it by putting in 'University of Sussex' and then putting in the information you put in to access the Sussex library on-line. The system is slow and needs patience and is not always responsive but it is a fantastic resource for students of English literature. Happy viewing! 

More about Woolf [Kew Gardens and the similarities between Woolf and Eliot]

Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, as discussed in the seminar, is a resonant text, with concealed layers that need to be excavated to uncover the rich meaning within. 

Due to Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style, and the difficulty this brings in the fluidity of the narrative, the same unpicking of ideas is needed in order to smooth out the texture of her ideas.

Another similarity, a prime characteristic of modernism, is the internal nature of the two texts. This inwardness is one of the hallmarks of modernism, and can be seen in TTL, as the events take place mainly within the characters heads, making them private, and giving us an access that we would not otherwise have. This is slightly intrusive in the part of the reader however to the disjointed and fragmented style require interpretation that must come from the mind of the reader himself. To see this shift to the internal, we can look at Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach'- a typical Victorian poem- 

"The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world"

The format of this poem is as one uttered to someone else, whereas in contrast 'Lovesong' its dramatic monologue style displays an inability to communicate with others (other than the reader). 

Another similarity would be the writers sense of continuity with the past- as we saw in Eliots 'Tradition and the Individual talent' preoccupies his poetry, as it does also with Woolf. Time is a complex theme in her writing- as is clear when we read Kew Gardens.
This short story is written through the perspective of a snail as it journeys along. It shows a man and woman walk past, lost in reveries of the past, then returns to ground level, where we witness more of the snails slow progression. We witness a range of other human interactions then return to see the busy life of London as a whole. One thing that we previously mentioned, that is done very well here, is the authors absence from the text, a strong characteristic of modernism, as the modernist authors believed that authors should not intrude into their own text, letting the story speak for itself.
From this we can see that a lot is left to our own interpretation, but on the other hand it also can make it difficult to interpret, its hard to get to know and to relate to the characters when they move in and out of the text in such a disjointed way.

So why does the text work so well, given its fragmented nature?

• strong elements of pattern, repetition and shape (which strengthen)
• all characters share one thing- a failure in communication
• flicking from human interaction to the flower bed gives the story, this links the separate narratives and provides a sense of familiarity in the text.
• Humans are stressed as purposeless, opposite to the snail- making a a contrast between the two.
• balance at the end of the 1st paragraph- ‘Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above’- which is similar to the final line- ‘and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air’.

'I feel certain that I am going mad again'

This is an animation I found on Youtube- (cheers for that) its quite a nice portrayal of Woolf's 'Kew Gardens'

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse

(το θε λιγηθούσε)

The novel is divided into 3 separate parts, including:

The Window, Time Passes and The Lighthouse.

These are fragmented into stream of consciousness narratives from different narrators.

The first begins just before the start of WW1, at the Ramsay's summer home in Scotland, where a lighthouse stands across the bay.

Here is a breakdown of events from the first section of the novel:

The Window:

• family conflict between 6yr old James and his father
• the family host a number of guests; Charles Tansley (who is in admiration of Mr Ramsays metaphysical philosophy), Lily Briscoe (the painter), Paul and Minta, who arrange to be married
• Mr Ramsay qualms over his shortcomings as a philospher
• There is tension at the dinner party
• Mrs Ramsay ponders the concept of time, reflecting that the dinner party has already slipped into the past.

Time Passes:

• 
• Here time passes more quickly
• Mrs Ramsay dies suddenly
• Andrew Ramsay is killed in battle
• Prue dies from an illness connected with child birth
• The summer house falls into a state of disrepair (weeds and spiders)
• 10 years pass until the family return again, to restore order into their beloved escape

The Lighthouse:

• War breaks out over Europe
• This sections narrative style is similar to section one, in its slow detail and shifting points of view
• Mr Ramsay professes he would like to journey to the lighthouse, though he gets into a temper when this is delayed
• Lily attempts to finish the painting she started on her last visit
• despite James's resentment to his father they have a moment of connection as the boat reaches its destination
• Lily is satisfied with her finished painting.

To understand Woolf's writing it is important to read a little of the context, the events that carried out and influenced her writing. Born into a prestigious literary family (her father the editor of 'The dictionary of national biography', and her mother the daughter of William Thackeray). Woolf, though extraordinary and succesful, experienced mental instability throughout her life.

She wrote for the 'Times Literary Supplement' and later found herself at the centre of the 'Bloomsbury Group'. Within this, the inspirational writers artists and Philosophers celebrated nonconformity, aesthetic pleasure and intellectual freedom. By the mid 1920's Woolf had published her most famous novels including To The Lighthouse- reaching the pinnacle of her profession.

Similar to the plot in 'Time Passes', her parents died when she was young, leaving her subject to mental illness, intense headaches and emotional breakdowns. In 1904, after her fathers death, Woolf attempted suicide by throwing herself out of the window (remember Sue in Jude the Obscure?). She married Leonard Woolf in 1912, but was never entirely satisified romantically or sexually, and after an intimate relationship with another woman, (Vita Sackville-West)  Woolf became terrified of another breakdown, and to avoid this trauma, for herself and her husband, drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Vita Sackville-West

Work:

Her work, written in an elegant, poised style, reflects her literary pedigree. It often celebrates the themes that occupied the Bloomsbury Group, such as feminism, aestheticism and independence, addressing issues contemporaneous to her era, examining the structures of human life (nature of relationships and experience of time).

Stream of Consciousness- this style was influenced by and responded to the work of Joyce, Marcel Proust and Henri Bergson (fr). In 'To the Lighthouse', the passage of time is portrayed through the consciousness of the characters, rather than the clock. A single afternoon takes up half the book where, the following ten years take place in a few pages. The modernist fiction is quite hard to read, the language is dense, and compared to the prior Victorian novels have little action, with most taking place in the characters minds.

The experimental nature reflects the attitudes at the fin de siecle, a time that we previously noticed is a time of great social change and scientific upheavel. (Darwin undermined universal faith in God, Freud introduced psychoanalysis, and with it the unconscious mind). 

To the Lighthouse is her most autobiographical work, with many of the characters based on her family.

This is a short documentary, useful if you want to know more about the lovely Mrs Woolf.

Alternatively here is a recording of her voice, as it is always interesting to know what accent she thought in when writing her novels.

Seminar Discussion Overview

Today, with two excellent presentations, we had a rich discussion of 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' - its solipsism, its stream of consciousness, its links to Baudelaire and Dante, its sense of the hellishness of accedia, its representation of fantasy and consciousness. We saw it as a text of mourning - for possibilities lost, roads not taken. When you read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse for next week, will you explore the family resemblances between this poem and Woolf's novel. What differences are there? We also read The Waste Land - as a dadaist and as a modernist text, with a sense of the difference between this text and Helen Mirrlees' Paris. We discussed the use of collage, of the texual fragment in The Waste Land and saw it as a formal response to the disruptions and destructions of the First World War. How do we read the micro and the macro level of the text in the wake of, in the light of the First World War. We will begin our seminar by discussing
Woolf;'s brief but incredibly innovative short story 'Kew Gardens' (in my compendium). It is a short story which has moments of focus on the now, images of nowness; it is also a kind of collage in anticipation of The Waste Land. So - Kew Gardens and To the Lighthouse for next week and a continuation of the illuminating discussion we had this morning.

T.S. Eliot- Tradition and the Individual Talent

T.S. Eliot notes that 'criticism is as inevitable as breathing' thus we should not pass judgement on ourselves 'for articulating what passes our minds'- this in itself is a juxtaposition, for if criticism can be read as judgement then it is inevitable. He recognises our tendency to draw comparisons between poets when reading their poetry, as 'we pretend to find what is individual'. When I draw comparisons between literature, it often is to prove to myself or to others how intellectually rounded I have become, a true english lit under grad that completes all my reading on time, if not before. As humans we like to be able to map our intellectual processes, to see how we have learned and 'bettered' ourselves, to show our worth in the human race. Eliot explains how it is important to do the opposite, (which is actually really the same) to notice the most 'individual parts of his work'. Really though, if we break this down, then it is the same as if we annotated all the components of a poem that link to previous works, and the parts left blank, are in fact the parts 'in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.' If this is the case, as Eliot says it is, then is there any individuality at all, surely then the entire poem or poet of study is just a recreation of their ancestors? What then, did the first ever poems consist of? Are they the true symbols of individuality? Are we as modern writers doomed never to achieve true originality?
Well this brings us onto tradition.
Tradition can be obtained ('by great labour') by a 'sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together'. This is what Eliot says. I am not T.S. Eliot and I do not have such a wide vocabulary as the man, though I wish I did. You may not either, so although you may find it degrading I have looked up the word 'temporal', just to check that I have the right meaning.

tem·po·ral ¹  (tmpr-l, tmprl)

adj.

1. Of, relating to, or limited by time: a temporal dimension; temporal and spatial boundaries.

2. Of or relating to the material world; worldly: the temporal possessions of the Church.

3. Lasting only for a time; not eternal; passing: our temporal existence.

4. Secular or lay; civil: lords temporal and spiritual.

5. Grammar Expressing time: a temporal adverb.

By mixing temporal and the timeless together, we can achieve tradition.

This is a video, so that when you read T.S. Eliot's 'Tradition', you can read it in his nice authentic monotone.

Basically, writers very essence is made up from the writing and ideas from the past, you must situate everything not as truly individual, rather as a product of the entire history of everything ever. Though this sounds sarcastic, I do agree with Eliot, I believe what he writes, and I can see it in every piece of literature that I have read. The only place that this thought might not apply is in the poetry or mutterings of a small child- one that is caught early, before the influences of an entire history of humanity has crushed down upon him. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Check out the wasteland (video above)- this has obvious references to past literature (from mythology) but also has formatic similarity to authors such as Helen Mirrless 'Paris'. Perhaps this is merely unconscious influencing, Mirrlees was a friend of Eliot, and her poem was published 3 years before, perhaps it was a conscious move, though there is no real written evidence to suggest this. We must, however, expect all these links and ties, as Eliot himself claimed them to be true in Tradition and the Individual Talent. We are made up of the past- 'the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.'


Now start thinking about this 'Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.'

References: T.S. Eliot- Tradition and the Individual Talent