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.
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
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...
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...
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
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...
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 Production
Christine Brooke-Rose
Here she examines Stephen Crane
, Nathaniel Hawthorne
, Ezra Pound
, and W. H. Auden
, as examples of the role and operation of poets or fiction writers who also produce criticism.
Textual Production
Jan Morris
Morris wrote on a wide range of topics for the Times, contributing The Comic Strip in American Life and The Plays of Eugene O'Neill to a collection of articles jointly titled The American Press...
Textual Production
Kathleen Raine
Early in her career KR
was known as a commentator on contemporary or near-contemporary, modernist poetry: a volume of her reviews written between January 1941 and March 1951 was published in 2002 as Defining the...
MD
's website features a series of poems indignantly addressed to William Langland
, author of Piers Plowman, of behalf of the new, unacknowledged poor. The New Vision of Piers Plowless sets the scene:...
Textual Production
Helen Dunmore
HD
's next novel, With Your Crooked Heart, the last in her triplet of thrillers, is titled from a poem by Auden
.
