Common wisdom has it that when Auden left England for New York in January 1939, he had already written his best poems. He left behind (most critics believe) all the idealisms of the 1930s and all serious concerns to become an unserious poet, a writer of ingenious, agreeable, minor lyrics. Lucy McDiarmid argues that such readers, spoiled by the simple intensities of apocalypse, distort and misjudge Auden's greatest work. She shows that once Auden was freed from the obligation to criticize and reform the society of his native country, he devoted his imaginative energies to commentary on art. And about art he was never complaisant: with greater passion than he had ever used to undermine "bourgeois" society, Auden undermined literature. Every major poem and every essay became a retractio, a statement of art's frivolity, vanity, and guilt. Auden's Apologies for Poetry, then, sets forth the unorthodox notion that the chief subject of later, "New Yorker" Auden is the insignificance of poetry. Commenting on all the major poems and essays from the 1930s through the 1960s, and analyzing manuscript revisions and unpublished works, it charts the changes in Auden's poetics in the light of his shift from an oral to a written model of poetry. In his earliest work Auden voices the tentative hope that poems can be like loving spoken words, transforming and redeeming, themselves carriers of value. After 1939 he takes for granted a written model. His later essays and poems deny art spiritual value, claiming that "love, or truth in any serious sense" is a "reticence," the unarticulated worth that exists--if at all--outside the words on the page. Later Auden creates a poetics of apology and self-deprecation, a radical undermining of poetry itself. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

W. H. Auden and Hannah Arendt belonged to a generation that experienced the catastrophic events of the mid-twentieth century, and they both sought to respond to the enormity of the novel phenomena they witnessed. Regions of Sorrow explores the remarkable affinity between their works. As incisive exponents and uncompromising proponents of the insuperable condition of plurality, Auden and Arendt give voice to an unexpected and inconspicuous messianism--a messianism in which contingency, frailty, and faultiness are neither rejected nor scorned but celebrated as the indispensable elements of what Auden calls "anxious hope." Beginning with an examination of Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and Auden's Age of Anxiety, which both conclude with meditations on Nazi terror, the author turns to an unprecedented presentation of Arendt's Human Condition in terms of Jewish-German messianism, and concludes with Auden's "In Praise of Limestone," which lays out the frail and faulty space in which messianism breaks free from apocalyptic forecasts.

W.H. Auden S Poetry: The Quest For Love Is A Study Of The Major Twentieth-Century British-American Poet W.H. Auden S Mutating Quest For Love In The Shifting And Interactive Freudian, Marxist And Christian-Kierkegaardian Contexts. It Focuses On The Poems Of The Most Fertile Period (1927-47) Of Auden S Poetic Career. Certain Identifiable Images Are Symbolic Of The Quest For Love In Each Phase, Offering An Analysis Of Man In Freudian And Marxist Terms. The Ameliorative Quest For Love Fulfils Itself In The Vision Of Divine Love In The Final Christian-Kierkegaardian Phase.This Ideal And Comprehensive Book Will Attract The Lovers Of Auden And Will Benefit The Scholars, Students, Teachers And Researchers Of The 20Th Century Poetry.

Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about?The history of poetry in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture; it is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeminginevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form.Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats'scentrality to twentieth-century poetry - and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality - is a major focus of the book. Serious Poetry argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in adistrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.

Through detailed considerations of poetry by Shakespeare, Keats, Edward Lear, Yeats, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Paul Muldoon, along with sustained meditations on question-forms in poems, the role of fact in fictions, the nature of literary value, speech acts and performative utterances issued by poets, the book sets out a fresh model for relationships between poetry, poets, and readers - one which allows the historical fact of poems having made things happen to be itself happening."--Jacket.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.

Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of thosefigures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation,understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally andinternationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution ofJames Joyce, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Samuel Beckett to the afterlife andreception of Shakespeare and his works.Each essay assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figurecovered and of that figure on the understanding, interpretation andappreciation of Shakespeare, providing a sketch of its subject's intellectualand professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context.

When Oscar Wilde said he had "seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime," his joke played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously--both in Wilde's day and in our own. In Fateful Beauty, Douglas Mao recovers the lost intellectual, social, and literary history of the belief that the beauty--or ugliness--of the environment in which one is raised influences or even determines one's fate. Weaving together readings in literature, psychology, biology, philosophy, education, child-rearing advice, and interior design, he shows how this idea abetted a dramatic rise in attention to environment in many discourses and in many practices affecting the lives of the young between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. Through original and detailed analyses of Wilde, Walter Pater, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, and W. H. Auden, Mao shows that English-language writing of the period was informed in crucial but previously unrecognized ways by the possibility that beautiful environments might produce better people. He also reveals how these writers shared concerns about environment, evolution, determinism, freedom, and beauty with scientists and social theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, and W.H.R. Rivers. In so doing, Mao challenges conventional views of the roles of beauty and the aesthetic in art and life during this time.

"American Writers focuses on the rich diversity of American novelists

A scholarly and deeply sensitive study that explores how religion and secularism are tightly interwoven in the major works of modernist literature Matthew Mutter provides a broad survey of modernist literature, examining key works against a background of philosophy, theology, intellectual and social history, while tracing the relationship of modernism’s secular imagination to the religious cultures that both preceded and shaped it. Mutter’s provocative study demonstrates how, despite their explicit desire to purify secular life of its religious residues, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and other literary modernists consistently found themselves entangled in the religious legacies they disavowed.