In Memory of W.B Yeats Flashcards
nightmarish European landscape of desolation, cold and entropy
the landscape is criss-crossed by congealed and arrested flows: brooks (figuratively springs of creativity and desire) are ‘frozen’, ‘snow’ effaces physical controls, the thermometer’s mercury becomes vacuous and ‘sinks’ as the temperature drops
‘it survives’
poetry survives and gives voice to survival in a space of isolation
‘flows south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs’
Auden makes his relocation to America explicit as in Europe American words like ‘ranches’ would have seemed literally out of place
Like all elegies…
it is as much concerned with the future as with the past.
what does it elegise?
the poet about whom he had decidedly mixed feelings; his own former style; a vatic, politically instrumental conception of the poet’s role within culture; the link that bounds Yeats’ and his own poetry to collective national traditions
what is its form?
an elegy organised into three sections
three sections outline
- Mournful Section: long breath-based Whitmanian
- Speaker reflects on generative power of poetry; free-verse
- Six stanzas of AABB verse, every line in seven-syllable trochaic verse
what is the first section?
Mournful Section: long breath-based Whitmanian
what is the second section?
free verse
what is the third section?
familiar six stanzas of AABB verse, every line in seven-syllable trochaic verse; ceremonial quatrains in tetrameter
what is the form of the third section?
ceremonial quatrains in tetrameter
what else changes in the form of the third section?
rhyme enters, prose rhythms give way to a ceremonial lyric language
James Persoon
‘two elements - the poet’s death as national and natural crisis and the poet’s death as almost completely insignificant - describe a tension within which Auden explores the life of the work after the death of the author.’
‘poetry makes nothing happen’
you could contrast this modesty with Pound at the same time broadcasting his ideas on Fascist radio.
‘each in the cell of himself’
recalls the locked chambers of Eliot’s The Waste Land
‘flows south / From ranches of isolation’ FREUDIAN
flows from isolated safety of the Freudian subconscious
‘a mouth’
provides voice to that deep level of raw and unassailable humanity
‘follow right / To the bottom of the night’
to the primordial humanity expressed in Yeats’ poetry, to human freedom where the ‘unconstraining voice’ can ‘persuade us to rejoice’
Poetry is a kind of farming that….
breaks open what is locked there and free feeling and ‘teach the free man how to praise’ offering a lesson on how to praise
language is presented as a public ritual…
that might join people together separated in the cells of himself (echoing Eliot’s TWL)
‘in the valley of its saying’
it survives in a kind of imaginary landscape or a world that is created through speech; a rich place to live but also a space that evokes a kind of absence; opening or gap.
‘a way of happening, a mouth’
the valley of its saying is reconfigured as an open mouth where words are coming out, flowing like a kind of river. It isn’t something thats happening but its the figure of potential action, a nothing that is somehow something too.
what words were chosen as Auden’s epitaph on his own memorial in Westminster abbey
‘In the prison of his days/ Teach the free man how to praise’
what happened in 1939
WB Yeats died, Auden moved to New York, WW2 broke out.
where was this poem written?
first poem Auden wrote in the US
what did Charles Altieri call his line ‘poetry makes nothing happen’
‘Auden’s famously anti-modernist statement’
