WYNSTAN HUGH AUDEN

WYNSTAN HUGH AUDEN

R.G. Cox associates Auden with a well-known and unique representative of the Modern painting at the beginning of the century- Pablo Picasso. Cox says that Auden is the Picasso of verse and shows some features of Auden's poetry that can be suited to Pi 515d31f casso's painting: "Auden is mainly a poet of general ideas; Auden is primarily a satirist; Auden's poetry is fundamentally romantic; Auden is most successful in light verse".

Auden was born in1907 and educated at Gresham's School and Oxford. He visited Berlin in 1928-1929, Spain in 1936 and two years later he went to China. During this period he published Poems in two editions, an English study in verse and prose The Orators (1932). A year later he published the dramatic poem The Dance of Death and continued with a play in verse and prose in 1935 The Dog Beneath the Skin, with Christopher Isherwood, and another one in 1936 The Ascent of F6.

In i937 he was awarded the King's medal for poetry. His first attempts were influenced by Romanticism and then he gave them up. As he started Eliot would be his master and he would be inspired by the social and the political realities. Among the persons he influenced him there were Marx, Freud and Blake. Auden also reacted against rationalism seen as alienation on instinct. In 1939 he decided to go to live in America. His activity here gave public more volumes: Journey to a War- verse and prose, poems- Another Time, New Year Letter which is a long poem and a sonnet sequence and For the Time Being. He published Collected Poems, in American Edition only, in 1945. He also received the Award of the American Academy of Letters.

Auden preferred more general and informal themes like death, wish, neuroses, and the dialectical struggle. He was also concerned with the sociological theme of communication that he tried to realize in his poems through association. Auden often combines abstract ideas with concrete things, so that ideas or qualities are to be found around us, in visual images. This combination is obvious in his simile, which represents a peculiarity of his work. The work of the poet is not only to communicate, to transmit but in Auden's opinion he is a "parable-maker". He combines here two important features: the poet seen as a maker/creator and the poetry connected to mythology.

According to Levi Peter, Auden's poetry is a poetry of love. L. Peter considers Auden "the least sentimental and yet warmest-hearted of poets". The poem Lullaby is considered one of Auden's greatest achievements in the genre, especially in the view of the parallelism proposed in the second stanza, which led to the highest level in the last stanza. Although Auden states that "soul and body have no bounds" the poem shows that "Eros can lead to Agape, and on the other that 'abstract insight' can induce Eros: the lover and the desert saint are closer than they might appear". In the second part of the poem The Age of Anxiety, he presents the surrealist vision of an adolescent sexual discovery. The sin becomes finally a gate toward social integration. Auden considers love the source of all that is lucid and civilized in human society. With Auden the poet acquires a special position in society and he is necessarily a medium permitting the passage from transient to transcendent.

Auden claimed that his God was the God of the orthodox and as Peter Levi states his Christianity is present in his poetry. However there is a point on which he did not agree with religion, i.e. "the father did not suffer over the sufferings of Christ". Auden could not simply conceive it.

Musee des Beaux Arts find its root in the special Breughel alcove in Musee Royaux des Beaux Arts: "about the 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."

There is an important element projected on the background of a common, fluent, unchanging life. The Old Masters are placed somewhere in a "corner" of the poem which represents in fact the life seen by them. The central world is suffering and the Old Masters are those who understand "its human position". Therefore suffering is a feature of the human condition. Christ is present in the poem in the syntagm "the dreadful martyrdom" placed "anyhow in a corner"; a very significant place contributes to the desacralised image. This poem about suffering is a ceaseless suffering as it is a continuous fall. Everything is too down to be saint and to down to be human.

The second part is based on a painting, Breughel's The Fall of Icarus. Breughel realized in his painting the image that Auden put in verse. First of all Auden notices that there are two components of the painting: "everything" and "the disaster", which seem to be two separate things accidentally appearing in the same image. Then both "everything" and "the disaster" are gradually presented: the ploughman who has not hear the splash, who has not hear the cry, the "sun shone" and "the white legs", "the green water", the ship and "the boy falling out of the sky". Every character in the painting does his own work, fallows his own way. They do not react at Icarus' fall either because they have no time to do it "the delicate ship./ Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on", they are caught in their own activities, or because they do not even realize that Icarus bears such a terrible suffering. In fact the fall is a particular one and only other artists can see it.

Auden, as well as Breughel, tries to bring the myth again in the present time. Christ, Icarus and the Old Masters are hypotheses of the same myth. Noticing Auden's interest in Breughel, Richard Hoggard states that: "the pleasure he took in Breughel's Icarus noting that what makes the scene so dramatic is the fact that normal life goes on unconcernedly whilst the tragedy takes place in its midst- is largely an aesthetic pleasure in pattern, contrast, gesture".