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.
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer noted in Travelling In a host of quotations from old and new sources: from studies in Zen Buddhism
, the Tao te Ching, the Theologica Germanica, and Julian of Norwich
Textual Production
Jane Gardam
The book is dedicated to Stone. Its epigraph quotes W. H. Auden
: We are not free to choose by what we / shall be enchanted. The poet advises, in the case of a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maggie Gee
Her central figure, Alfred White, a park-keeper in a London borough based on that of Brent, is an old-fashioned ex-soldier who combines integrity, compassion, and intense pride in his job, with a violent temper...
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...
Friends, Associates
Susan Hill
While studying at King's CollegeSH
, an aspiring writer, wrote to novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson
and her writer husband C. P. Snow
for advice on the profession. The couple answered her letters and even...
The volume was not an instant success, though it was later admired by authors such as E. M. Forster
and W. H. Auden
.
Parker, Peter, editor. A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press.
345-6
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Storm Jameson
Her central theme here is the responsibility of the writer for the survival of the values of liberal humanism.
British Book News. British Council.
(1950): 838
Her title essay paints a sombre political picture of Britain. SJ
discusses the...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Jennings
As a teenager, EJ
read T. S. Eliot
and (as she put it) wrote long poems of sort of vers libre which I imagined were influenced by Eliot, and which were very personal, in fact...
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...
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
Other authors with connections to Bloomsbury were drawn to Wuhan: W. H. Auden
and Christopher Isherwood
visited the campus on 22 April 1938 during their longer trip on which they wrote about the Sino-Japanese...
Intertextuality and Influence
Liz Lochhead
The Recitations (poems in which the speaking voice is crucial, most of them sharply Scots-vernacular comments on sexual or gender relations) include the title piece, Bagpipe Muzak, Glasgow 1990. This laments (in a nice...
