Brief overview:
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.'
- 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.
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
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