Hello Beautiful People,
I am Riddhi Bhatt. You know...what is today's blog ?This blog is about W.H.Auden’s poem. As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper called The Twentieth Century Literature: From World War II to the End of the Century (paper-107).Our professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir discussed this unit and assigned us one of the most creative tasks to interpret and given to answer this question. Here first we know some brief introductions about W. H.Auden.
Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".
Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential, and critical views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive—treating him as a lesser figure than W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot—too strongly affirmative, as in Joseph Brodsky's statement that he had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century". After his death, his poems became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.
Here we are discussing about 3 poems of Auden and giving answers also to given task by professor.
- September 1,1939
- In Memory of W.B.Yeats
- Epitaph On a Tyrant
1)Which lines of 'September 1, 1939' you liked the most? Why?
(1)
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
The opening lines to one of Auden’s most famous poems (albeit one he rejected later in life) attained new resonance after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Here he is referring to the time when Hitler invaded Poland, thus beginning the disastrous Second World War. The “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s was one of global depression, the rise of dictators, the failure of appeasement, and the isolationism of the United States. Auden understood that maniacal rulers were not new; he evokes the ghost of Thucydides, who wrote of dictators in the era of the Greeks, and points to one the basic psychological issues for such men: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” While Europe disintegrates, the poet is safe but troubled in New York City.These opening lines also introduce the poem's speaker, a first-person voice who describes not just his location at the bar, but also his emotions as he sits there: "Uncertain and afraid." Following this forthright admission, lines 4 and 5 clarify the cause of the speaker's uncertainty, and also shed light on the poem's central concern: the rise of authoritarianism.
As the speaker sees it, the "low dishonest decade" of the 1930s, which bore witness to the rise of fascism across Europe, is about to "expire" (or end), and along with it, any "clever" but naive "hopes" that the speaker (and others) may have had for a better, less frightening time.
In keeping with the poem's dark themes, the language of these opening lines also helps create a foreboding atmosphere right from the start. A strong current of sibilance runs ominously through these early lines, in words like "sit," "second," "street," "uncertain," and "dishonest," while the alliterative /d/ sounds in "dishonest decade" create a steady drumbeat of fear. Lines 3 and 5 rhyme as well (despite the poem's overall lack of a consistent rhyme scheme) thus further linking the emotions of the speaker and the terrible times he is living in through the matching sounds of "afraid" and "decade."
(2)
“We must love one another or die.”
In the poem's most famous line, the speaker declares, “We must love one another or die.” The speaker consistently argues for the benefits of human connection, rejecting the all-too-human impulse to desire “not universal love / but to be loved alone.” It’s far better for society, the speaker argues, for people to acknowledge that “no one exists alone,” and with that knowledge, to connect with others who are “Just.” Only by overcoming selfishness and working together, the speaker insists, can people keep the “affirming flame” of hope and love burning bright. To put it bluntly, human survival itself depends on love.
2) What is so special about 'In Memory of W B Yeats'?
✔ In ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ Auden taps into themes of life after death, the power of poetry, and the human condition. The powerful and wide-ranging themes are discussed within the context of Yeats’ life and death. Auden uses an exacting tone and direct language to depict the events around Yeat’s death. The mood is at times uplifting and at others concerning and worrying. There are many dark images and many fewer hopeful ones.
If I want to tell you that what is things in this poem who impressing me that Auden says that Yeats' art lives on, as if it is an autonomous, living thing now detached from its host.Auden's poem draws on all these traditions as it focuses just on that moment when the words of a poet must begin to live on after his death.Most important, Auden understands this process of poetic after-life as taking place entirely within history.Poems about death tend to be concerned not just with loss, but also with what remains after a man or a woman dies.Auden makes use of several poetic techniques in ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’. These include enjambment, allusion, and alliteration. An allusion is an expression that’s meant to call something specific to mind without directly stating it.Alliteration occurs when words are used in succession, or at least appear close together, and begin with the same sound. For example, “dying day” in the fourth line of the first stanza in section one, or “Silence” and “suburbs” in stanza three of the same section. Auden then describes Yeats’s death, in the third stanza, concluding that, with his passing, Yeats ‘became his admirers’: once Yeats the man had ceased to be, Yeats the poet became whatever his readers and fans decided he was. Here, we can sense Auden making a broader point about the ‘immortality’ of poets: they survive or don’t survive depending on who reads them, and how those readers read them. Yeats’s work is ‘scattered’ all over the world in those cities where people read him, often finding surprising things in his work which Yeats himself would not recognise (‘unfamiliar affections’). Auden here is prefiguring one of the most influential ideas in twentieth-century literary criticism, that of the ‘intentional fallacy’ or ‘death of the author’, where the worth and meaning of a writer lie with the reader rather than the author. Auden says that the words of a dead man are ‘modified in the guts of the living’: we cannot help but change the meaning of what a poet wrote, adapting it to suit out our times and our own feelings.
Auden concludes this first section of ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ by acknowledging that the world will go on tomorrow, but a ‘few thousand’ will think of the day Yeats died as ‘one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual’.
3) Is there any contemporary relevance of 'Epitaph on a Tyrant'?
✔ Firstly, in simple term what is the meaning of Tyrant so..Tyrant, Greek tyrannos, a cruel and oppressive ruler or, in ancient Greece, a ruler who seized power unconstitutionally or inherited such power.
The poem “Epitaph on a Tyrant” by W. H. Auden was written in 1939 and describes an unnamed tyrant. “Epitaph on a tyrant is written and rhyme and utilizes a refreshingly deviant tone ad a subtle sort of symbolism to get the point across.In the poem “Epitaph of a Tyrant”, Auden uses distinct words like “perfection” to express the common goal of tyrants and their political schemes of reaching the stage of perfection in a society. “Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after / And the poetry he invented was easy to understand”
We can find so many tyrants like Adolf Hitler nowadays. Who wants power, money and wants to create utopia and his own world or country. We can find so many leaders who are purely called tyrants in contemporary times.
⭐Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party,Hitler aimed to eliminate Jews from Germany and establish a New Order to counter what he saw as the injustice of the post-World War I international order dominated by Britain and France. His first six years in power resulted in rapid economic recovery from the Great Depression, the abrogation of restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I, and the annexation of territories inhabited by millions of ethnic Germans, which gave him significant popular support.Historian and biographer Ian Kershaw describes Hitler as "the embodiment of modern political evil".Under Hitler's leadership and racially motivated ideology, the Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of about 6 million Jews and millions of other victims whom he and his followers deemed Untermenschen (subhumans) or socially undesirable. Hitler and the Nazi regime were also responsible for the killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war. In addition, 28.7 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European theatre. The number of civilians killed during World War II was unprecedented in warfare, and the casualties constitute the deadliest conflict in history.
⭐Donald Trump
Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American media personality and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.Mueller also investigated Trump for obstruction of justice and neither indicted nor exonerated him. The House of Representatives impeached Trump on December 18, 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after he solicited Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. The Senate acquitted him of both charges on February 5, 2020.Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Biden, but refused to concede defeat. He attempted to overturn the results by making false claims of electoral fraud, pressuring government officials, mounting scores of unsuccessful legal challenges and obstructing the presidential transition.
THAN YOU..😍
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