September 1 1939

September 1 1939 PDF Author: Ian Sansom
Publisher: Fourth Estate
ISBN: 9780007557233
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This is a book about a poet W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left. About a poem September 1, 1939, his most famous and celebrated, yet one which he tried to rewrite and disown and which has enjoyed or been condemned to a tragic and unexpected afterlife. About a city New York, an island, an emblem of the Future, magnificent, provisional, seamy, and in 1939 about to emerge as the defining twentieth-century cosmopolis, the capital of the world. And about a world at a point of change about 1939, and about our own Age of Anxiety, about the aftermath of September 11, when many American newspapers reprinted Auden's poem in its entirety on their editorial pages.

September 1 1939

September 1 1939 PDF Author: Ian Sansom
Publisher: Fourth Estate
ISBN: 9780007557233
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
This is a book about a poet W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left. About a poem September 1, 1939, his most famous and celebrated, yet one which he tried to rewrite and disown and which has enjoyed or been condemned to a tragic and unexpected afterlife. About a city New York, an island, an emblem of the Future, magnificent, provisional, seamy, and in 1939 about to emerge as the defining twentieth-century cosmopolis, the capital of the world. And about a world at a point of change about 1939, and about our own Age of Anxiety, about the aftermath of September 11, when many American newspapers reprinted Auden's poem in its entirety on their editorial pages.

September 1, 1939

September 1, 1939 PDF Author: Ian Sansom
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062984616
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
One poet, his poem, New York City, and a world on the verge of change. W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality, became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left. And his poem, “September 1, 1939,” was his most famous and celebrated, yet one which he tried to rewrite and disown and which has enjoyed—or been condemned—to a tragic and unexpected afterlife. These are the contributing forces underlying Ian Sansom’s work excavating the man and his most celebrated piece of literature. But Sansom’s book is also about New York City: an island, an emblem of the Future, magnificent, provisional, seamy, and in 1939—about to emerge as the defining twentieth-century cosmopolis, the capital of the world. And so it is also about a world at a point of change—about 1939, and about our own Age of Anxiety, about the aftermath of September 11, when many American newspapers reprinted Auden’s poem in its entirety on their editorial pages. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, this is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.

Auden and the Muse of History

Auden and the Muse of History PDF Author: Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503633934
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Concentrating on W. H. Auden's work from the late 1930s, when he seeks to understand the poet's responsibility in the face of a triumphant fascism, to the late 1950s, when he discerns an irreconcilable "divorce" between poetry and history in light of industrialized murder, this startling new study reveals the intensity of the poet's struggles with the meanings of history. Through meticulous readings, significant archival findings, and critical reflection, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb presents a new image and understanding of Auden's achievement and reveals how his version of modernism illuminates urgent contemporary issues and theoretical paradigms: from the meaning of marriage equality to the persistence of fascism; from critical theory to psychoanalysis; from precarity to postcolonial studies. "The muse does not like being forced to choose between Agit-prop and Mallarmé," Auden writes with characteristic lucidity, and this study elucidates the probity, humor, and technical skill with which his responses to historical reality in the mid-twentieth century illuminate our world today.

The Island

The Island PDF Author: Nicholas Jenkins
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674296818
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden’s early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England. From his first poems in 1922 to the publication of his landmark collection On This Island in the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden wrestled with the meaning of Englishness. His early works are prized for their psychological depth, yet Nicholas Jenkins argues that they are political poems as well, illuminating Auden’s intuitions about a key aspect of modern experience: national identity. Two historical forces, in particular, haunted the poet: the catastrophe of World War I and the subsequent “rediscovery” of England’s rural landscapes by artists and intellectuals. The Island presents a new picture of Auden, the poet and the man, as he explored a genteel, lyrical form of nationalism during these years. His poems reflect on a world in ruins, while cultivating visions of England as a beautiful—if morally compromised—haven. They also reflect aspects of Auden’s personal search for belonging—from his complex relationship with his father, to his quest for literary mentors, to his negotiation of the codes that structured gay life. Yet as Europe veered toward a second immolation, Auden began to realize that poetic myths centered on English identity held little potential. He left the country in 1936 for what became an almost lifelong expatriation, convinced that his role as the voice of Englishness had become an empty one. Reexamining one of the twentieth century’s most moving and controversial poets, The Island is a fresh account of his early works and a striking parable about the politics of modernism. Auden’s preoccupations with the vicissitudes of war, the trials of love, and the problems of identity are of their time. Yet they still resonate profoundly today.

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I PDF Author: W. H. Auden
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069121929X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 842

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Book Description
The first of two volumes of the eagerly anticipated first complete edition of Auden’s poems—including some that have never been published before W. H. Auden (1907–1973) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his reputation has only grown since his death. Published on the hundredth anniversary of the year in which he began to write poetry, this is the first of two volumes of the first complete edition of Auden’s poems. Edited, introduced, and annotated by renowned Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, this definitive edition includes all the poems Auden wrote for publication, in their original texts, and all his later revised versions, as well as poems and songs he never published, some of them printed here for the first time. This volume traces the development of Auden’s early career, and contains all the poems, including juvenilia, that he published or submitted for publication, from his first printed work, in 1927, at age twenty, through the poems he wrote during his first months in America, in 1939, when he was thirty-two. The book also includes poems that Auden wrote during his adult career with the expectation that he might publish them, but which he never did; song lyrics that he wrote to be set to music by Benjamin Britten, but which he never put into print; and verses that he wrote for magazines at schools where he was teaching. The main text presents the poems in their original published versions. The notes include the extensive revisions that he made to his poems over the course of his career, and provide explanations of obscure references. The second volume of this edition, Poems, Volume 2: 1940–1973, is also available.

The English Auden

The English Auden PDF Author: Wystan Hugh Auden
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
All of Auden's books of poems from the 1930's, including previously unpublished poems, are augmented by selections from his essays, reviews, film scripts, and stage and radio plays of the same period.

The Afterlife of Idealism

The Afterlife of Idealism PDF Author: Admir Skodo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319293850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This book examines the legacy of philosophical idealism in twentieth century British historical and political thought. It demonstrates that the absolute idealism of the nineteenth century was radically transformed by R.G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott, and Benedetto Croce. These new idealists developed a new philosophy of history with an emphasis on the study of human agency, and historicist humanism. This study unearths the impact of the new idealism on the thought of a group of prominent revisionist historians in the welfare state period, focusing on E.H. Carr, Isaiah Berlin, G.R. Elton, Peter Laslett, and George Kitson Clark. It shows that these historians used the new idealism to restate the nature of history and to revise modern English history against the backdrop of the intellectual, social and political problems of the welfare state period, thus making new idealist revisionism a key tradition in early postwar historiography.

Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957

Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 PDF Author: Wystan Hugh Auden
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
"This collection stops at the year nineteen-fifty-seven. In the following year I transferred my summer residence from Italy to Austria, so starting a new chapter in my life which is not yet finished. The poems included cover a span of thirty years, there are, if I've counted rightly, three hundred of them, I was twenty when I wrote the earliest, fifty when I wrote the latest: four nice round numbers. Besides, the volume looks alarmingly big already."--From the foreword.

Selected Poems of W. H. Auden

Selected Poems of W. H. Auden PDF Author: W. H. Auden
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307278085
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This significantly expanded edition of W. H. Auden’s Selected Poems adds twenty poems to the hundred in the original edition, broadening its focus to better reflect the enormous wealth of form, rhetoric, tone, and content in Auden’s work. Newly included are such favorites as “Funeral Blues” and other works that represent Auden’s lighter, comic side, giving a fuller picture of the range of his genius. Also new are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure to younger generations of readers and a revised introduction that draws on recent additions to knowledge about Auden. As in the original edition, the new Selected Poems makes available the preferred original versions of some thirty poems that Auden revised later in life, making it the best source for enjoying the many facets of Auden’s art in one volume.

Literary Community-Making

Literary Community-Making PDF Author: Roger D. Sell
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027210314
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The writing and reading of so-called literary texts can be seen as processes which are genuinely communicational. They lead, that is to say, to the growth of communities within which individuals acknowledge not only each other's similarities but differences as well. In this new book, Roger D. Sell and his colleagues apply the communicational perspective to the past four centuries of literary activity in English. Paying detailed attention to texts – both canonical and non-canonical – by Amelia Lanyer, Thomas Coryate, John Boys, Pope, Coleridge, Arnold, Kipling, William Plomer, Auden, Walter Macken, Robert Kroetsch, Rudy Wiebe and Lyn Hejinian, the book shows how the communicational issues of addressivity, commonality, dialogicality and ethics have arisen in widely different historical contexts. At a metascholarly level, it suggests that the communicational criticism of literary texts has significant cultural, social and political roles to play in the post-postmodern era of rampant globalization.