Comparing T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland and William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming World War One fundamentally changed Europeans perspective on man. Before the war they believed that man was innately good, after it people were disenchanted with this vision of man. Both Thomas Sterns Eliot and William Butler Yeats keenly felt this disenchantment, and evinced it in their poetry. In addition to the war, Eliot and Yeats also saw the continuing turmoil in Europe, such as the Russian Revolution and
Death Reflected in Auden’s Funeral Blues, Forche’s Memory of Elena, and Dickinson’s Last Night that She lived Death is a natural and inevitable part of life. Everyone will experience death, whether it is of a loved one or oneself. In W.H. Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues” (1003), he describes such a catastrophic event and the drastic effect that it has on his life. It is interesting how people choose to accept this permanent and expected event, death. Similarly, Emily Dickinson has written many
The Unknown Citizen In "The Unknown Citizen," Auden is implying that people are statistics and easily conformed to the normality of society. Throughout the poem, Auden portrays the character as being an all around normal citizen and "one against whom there was no official complaint." In lines 4 and 5, the speaker describes the character as a "saint" and "for in everything he did he served the Greater Community." He served in war, never got fired from his job, popular with his mates, and "normal
profit or political gain or other extrinsic considerations that executives might bring to their decision-making. Taking “poetry” to stand in for any/all creative arts, how would you understand Auden’s provocative statement? Page 2 The line of W. H. Auden’s, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” which we find in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” is without a doubt both an important statement about modern poetry and one of the greatest lines to be found within modern poetry. It not only appears to denounce
Introduction Philip Larkin, born in 1922, has been read under what are generally perceived as his major themes: death, fatalism and gloominess. However, throughout his life he had constantly been struggling with and reflecting on problems of sex, marriage, love, and living (cf. Motion, esp. 291). Publishing four volumes of poetry until his decease in 1985, Larkin became known for his lucid and often sharp-witted verse as well as for being socially withdrawn, sometimes called “the Hermit of Hull”
What is a person worth to their society? People do not normally consider what their community values them for, and perhaps ignorance is better than the realization of the truth. “The Unknown Citizen,” a poem by W. H. Auden, is an almost tedious epitaph of a deceased man’s life, but the poem is unexpectedly profound in its purpose of causing the reader to evaluate his or her own meaning to society. Other works that touch on the same topic as Auden’s poem are the plays Mrs Warren’s Profession by
The idea of crossing boundaries and its failures and triumphs is explored in the autobiography, Sally’s Story by Sally Morgan, which tells you about the life of a young Aborigine who overcame many boundaries in order to develop and change her life and the lives of others. Comparably, the poem, “Refugee blues” by Wystan Hugh Auden discusses about migrants who crossed a geographical boundary and experienced difficulty fitting in. These two texts discuss the experience of prejudice and segregation
Analysis of William Butler Yeats' Poems; When You Are Old, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Wild Swans at Coole, The Second Coming and Sailing to Byzantium In many poems, short stories, plays, television shows and novels an author usually deals with a main idea in each of their works. A main reason they do this is due to the fact that they either have a strong belief in that very idea or it somehow correlates to an important piece of their life overall. For example the author Thomas Hardy likes
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, North Yorkshire, as the son of George Augustus Auden, a distinguished physician, and Rosalie (Bicknell) Auden. Solihull in the West Midlands, where Auden was brought up, remained important to him as a poet. Auden was educated at St. Edmund's Hindhood and then at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk. In 1925 he entered Christ Church, Oxford. Auden's studies and writing progressed without much success: he took a disappointing third-class degree in English. And his first
As we all know, life reflects Poetry, poetry nurture each soul, poetic beauty of salvation. That is the unchanging values seem to never change in the lives of each of us. When I was young, my mom put me to sleep by the soothing poem. So, I was familiar with the verse. Last week, I read two poems “As I Walked out one evening” and the “The more loving one”, which were written by W.H. Auden. English is m second language, so it is hard to understand the English’s poem by form or theme. However, that
Both Wilfred Owen and W.H Auden effectively express their opinions on the sensitive topic of war, having experienced the direct impact of it first hand which is indisputably evident in their poems ‘Disabled’ and ‘Refugee Blues’ respectively. Both the poems focus on the intense depiction of the unglamorous consequences tied with war. ‘Disabled’ as per the title is about a young soldier disabled both physically and emotionally during combat. The poem is written in close focus third person and zooms
State, which is the speaker of the poem, does not know much about the citizen, making the praise poem essentially worthless. In addition, the poem reduces what is considered sacred and passionate into numbers and statistics. The speaker mentions that “[h]e was married and added five children to the population,/ Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation” (Auden 29-31). A child’s birth, usually a celebrated and miraculous event, becomes merely part of an effort to fulfill
Dealing With the Issue of Separation in Poetry Introduction In recent weeks in English we studied 3 poems of varying origin and of various types of poetry. We studied Havisham, by Carol Ann Duffy, Stop all the clocks by W.H. Auden and Valediction: Forbidden mourning by John Donne. All of which are about the loss of loved ones, but in a different way. In 'Havisham', the bride (Miss Havisham) was left at the altar by her to-be-husband; she has sat in her dressing room
“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” by W.H. Auden is about people mourning after they lose a loved one. He shows us that when people are mourning that they turn off everything in their minds. People shut everyone and everything out of their lives, and spend time with just themselves. Everyone who has lost someone that they love knows that it is a very hard time, and they have to learn how to live life without them. When we lose someone we think that they were our whole world, and that we
Today I’m going to assist you in finding your inner poet, a world you never thought imaginable. Poetry is the gold medal of literature. It takes the reader on an emotional expedition; this is done by having a strong subject matter, thoughtful moods and tones, and finally by perfectly executing the use of multiple poetic devices. Wystan Hugh Auden wrote an all-time classic titled Stop All the Clocks. This poem grabs the reader by the hand and takes them into an escape from reality. Stop All the Clocks
If one were to look at the life of Stephen Spender briefly they would think that he was a bizarre maybe even troubled man. However, if you look deeply into his life you will see beyond the strangeness. Stephen was indeed a unique man that lived a complicated life to which created his uniqueness that we see demonstrated through his poetry. While most people tend to avoid unintentional controversy, Stephen Spender wrote many poems which most of us would feel as controversial. His goal however was not
In two of Auden’s major works he uses the idea of absent-mindedness to express how humans can be self-centered, and tend to have a blind eye towards other peoples’ issues rather than their own. In “Musée des Beaux Arts”, Auden uses a painting by Pieter Brueghel called, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus as a setting for his poem, and uses the characters in the painting as proof that people can be very self-absorbed and unaware. Auden also portrays this same idea in his poem “Funeral Blues”, in which
The Unknown Citizen Is Me “The Unknown Citizen”, a poem written by W.H. Auden, reflects a period of vast change in America’s history, making “The Unknown Citizen” an example of the government’s view of the perfect modern man in an overrated, unrealistic society. During the time period that this poem was written, in the late 1930’s, The United States was going through tremendous social, political and economic change. Following the passing of Black Monday and at the onset of The Great Depression
party happening and no one will know about it. That was relevant then, and still is to this day. W.H. Auden knew this and summarizes it in just a few words in lines 13-14 he states; In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: How everything turns away Quite H. Auden’s "Musee des Beaux Arts" he states; How, when the aged are reverntly, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be children who do not specially want it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood. Those lines
Besides metaphors, Auden also uses historical allusion to show how society is stuck in an authoritarian and conformist mindset. September 1, 1939 is not just the day Auden sat feeling depressed in a bar, but the day Germany invaded Poland, ultimately sparking world war two. The U.S. was in shock and fear as they could only watch as Hitler and the nazi army invaded the Slavs in an attempt to expand Germany's territory. (History.com) Auden used this current event as a way to draw people to his poem