Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
W. H. Auden
-
Standard Name: Auden, W. H.
Used Form: Wystan Hugh Auden
WHA
has been called the outstanding poet of his generation. His prolific output of poetry is endlessly versatile, often deeply personal but usually also carrying political freight, often experimental, combining the classical and the colloquial, the lyric and the deliberately prosaic. He wrote a great deal in collaboration, often for stage or even operatic performance. He was a riveting lecturer and an unsystematic but always stimulating literary critic.
This volume's title and epigraph are taken from The Great Gatsby. Like AR
's other works, Dark Fields of the Republic reflects a diverse group of artistic and social influences, which include the Bible...
Textual Features
Seamus Heaney
These pieces cover elders and friends (Larkin
, Walcott
, Patrick Kavanagh
), poets of Eastern Europe where poetry performs the service of resistance to political oppression (as it might do in Northern Ireland...
Textual Features
Philip Larkin
As an undergraduate Larkin was naturally still finding his voice. One poem dating from probably 1943 has its title and its lesbian topic from Charles Baudelaire
: Femmes Damnées. Larkin's poem of this title...
Reception
Marianne Moore
A late flowering of MM
's reputation began when she spoke at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in a double bill with W. H. Auden
.
Williams, Mary-Kay. “What a Mother”. London Review of Books, Vol.
37
, No. 23, p. 19021.
21
Reception
Elizabeth Jennings
EJ
has said that at this date she was beginning to achieve in her work a certain mastery of form
Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books.
100
and the quality she was aiming at, a clarity, a kind of lyrical innocence...
politics
Virginia Woolf
Through the 1930s, Woolf struggled to define herself and her work against the rise of Fascism in Europe, to chart the relationship between artistic and political tasks. She and her Bloomsbury friends began to be...
politics
Sybille Bedford
At this time, with a German passport near its expiry date and an application for French citizenship which had so far gone nowhere, she attracted the attention of the Nazi authorities not only by expressing...
politics
Rosamond Lehmann
RL
, like many of the left-wing intellectuals in the inter-war period, supported the fight against fascism in Spain. Her husband Wogan and many of her male friends, including Auden
, joined the International Brigade
She had the idea for the title novella when she and editor George Davis
and poet W. H. Auden
were in a bar where other customers included a woman who was tall and strong as...
Material Conditions of Writing
E. J. Scovell
EJS
began writing poetry in early childhood because of a love of meter and rhyme.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
As an undergraduate at Oxford
she was placing her poetry in university journals. She was one of the few women...
Material Conditions of Writing
Adrienne Rich
Her father had planned for her to be a poet; he encouraged her to write something every day and show it to him.
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, pp. Review 20 - 3.
21
Though at some stages she hated this, she came to believe...
Literary responses
Adrienne Rich
W. H. Auden
, with genuine admiration but instinctive condescension, praised Rich's poems as neatly and modestly dressed. He found them like good girls who speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but...
