Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1964. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: leaves 350-364.

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The subject of this dissertation is W. H. Auden's use of the Jungian psychology of individuation and the Kierkegaardian theology of existence. Its purpose is to demonstrate the importance of Jungian and Kierkegaardian thought in poetry written during 1939 through 1942, the first four years of Auden's residency in the United States and the first four years of his return to the church. The purpose is achieved by applying a paradigm encompassing both psychology and theology to an analysis of Jungian and Kierkegaardian thought in the principal sonnets of "The Quest" and to a detailed explication of two longer poems, New Year Letter and For the Time Being.

This thesis challenges the assumption that Chaucer is the father of the living English poetic tradition. Nobody would deny that poetry existed in a form of English before the fourteenth century, but it is commonly assumed that linguistic and cultural changes have made Anglo-Saxon poetry a specialist area of concern, of no use or interest to modern poets. It is demonstrated that during the nineteenth century, advances in linguistic and textual scholarship made Anglo-Saxon poetry more widely available than had been the case, probably since the Anglo-Norman period. Knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature is subsequently communicated to poets, particularly after the subject is institutionalized in English departments at British and American universities. Chapter One charts this rise in awareness of Anglo-Saxon poetry and considers its effects on several nineteenth-century poets (William Barnes, Henry Longfellow, Alfred Tennyson and William Morris). Major studies then follow of Gerard Hopkins, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden and the uses that they make of Anglo-Saxon in their own poetry. It is argued that through these writers Anglo-Saxon has had a more important impact on modern poetry than has been thought previously. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon is often included as part of a poetics that might be called 'modernist'. For each of the three poets under study, the nature of their contact with Anglo-Saxon poetry is determined from documentary evidence (whether at university, or via secondary literature), and different stylistic debts are examined by close readings of a number of poems. No previous work has attempted a detailed analysis of the uses to which these three writers put Anglo-Saxon poetry. This thesis offers such an analysis and synthesizes the different approaches to Anglo-Saxon in order to provide an overview of this phenomenon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.

ix, 242 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Modernism's fragmented literary style has been called "an art of cities." My project challenges such conventional understandings by exposing a strain within modernism that expresses an awareness of a broader phenomenological world. In the work of E.M Forster, Virginia Woolf, and W.H. Auden, non-human presences are often registered through a character or speaker's innate sensory perception of their surroundings--what I call embodied modernism. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ecophenomenology theorizes the intercorporeality of humans and the environment in ways that help elucidate this aspect of their work. Merleau-Ponty uses the phrase "flesh of the world" to explain the body as an open circuit embedded within the stimuli of larger environmental impulses. The uncertainty stirring within modernism's formal disruptions, the sensory impressions revealed by stream of consciousness techniques, as well as the robust fusion of latent emotions and unspoken associations that result in a memorable image or symbol invite ecophenomenological readings. Chapter I, "Passage From Pastoral: E.M. Forster," traces a developing phenomenological awareness that is only fully manifested through the formal innovation of Forster's modernist novel, A Passage to India , where landscape intervenes to direct the action of the plot. My second chapter, "The Phenomenological Whole: Virginia Woolf," analyzes how her use of personification provocatively disrupts anthropocentrism in "Kew Gardens" and Flush. Her conception of a more-than-human world also complicates elegiac readings of To the Lighthouse by positioning nature not as a sympathetic minor for humans, nor an antagonistic foil, but rather as a presence that intertwines with human life and renews embodied creativity. "Brute Being: W.H. Auden" shows how Auden's later poems create a lexicon of common cultural assumptions about human identity in a firmly ordered relation with the world but combat their own hermeneutics by slipping towards the opposite binary in any dialectic the poem presents, whether it be scientific order and organic chaos, nature and culture, or human observer and non-human subject. Analyzing the work of Forster, Woolf, and Auden from the embodied perspective of Merleau-Ponty's ecophenomenology both challenges conventional definitions of modernism and expands ecocritical theory. / Adviser: Louise Westling

And the Word Was Made Flesh: Anthropomorphism in the poetry of WH Auden examines the reasons for the neglect of Auden’s prolific deployment of anthropomorphism by examining the poetry’s critical reception with a view to understanding what larger purpose, what ‘strategy of discourse’ (Ricoeur 2003, The Rule of Metaphor: 5-9), Auden may have had in mind when he revived a trope traditionally regarded as retrograde. Anxious not to be mistaken for a Modern, yet unable to find a social rhetoric to suit his purposes, Auden elected upon a new style of poetry which questioned the very foundations of language by placing anthropomorphism, the ascription of agency and sentience to voiceless entities, at its centre. The study explores anthropomorphism from historical and theoretical perspectives in an attempt to explain the reasons for its demise, at least, within the academy. This study emphasises the importance Auden placed on the everyday activity of reading, the principal focus for the poet’s ‘cultural theory’ (Boly 1991 and 2004: 138). Auden, 'eager to create a tradition of its own' (Emig 2000: 1), abjuring propaganda, hoped to educate the reader to resist the different ideologies which were vying for ascendency during the 1930s. This study will demonstrate that anthropomorphism, with its capacity to suggest alternative words to ‘re-describe reality’ (Ricoeur 2003: 5), played a pivotal role in Auden’s project for cultural renewal. This study demonstrates that the lasting benefit of Auden’s use of anthropomorphism is to have recognised with prescience what critics now recognise as a 'revolutionary and potently counter-cultural tactic of cultural appropriation' (Paxson 1994: 173), a trope that 'engenders within its semiotic structure a hidden critique of Western culture' (Paxson: 50). Evidence from recent linguistic theory is marshalled in support of the trope’s rehabilitation. This study examines a selection of Auden’s four hundred published poems, and it also offers a provisional taxonomy to initiate the complex process of classifying instances of personification and its co-ordinate tropes in poetry. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This dissertation contains two parts: Part I, which discusses the methods and means by which poets achieve originality within ekphrastic works; and Part II, Recklessness and Light, a collection of poems. Poets who seek to write ekphrastically are faced with a particular challenge: they must credibly and substantially build on the pieces of art they are writing about. Poems that fail to achieve invention become mere translations. A successful ekphrastic poem must in some way achieve originality by using the techniques of the artist to credibly and substantially build on the art. The preface discusses three ekphrastic poems: W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror,” and Larry Levis’ “Caravaggio: Swirl and Vortex.” In order to invent, each of these poets connects time within the paintings to time within the poem. The poets turn to techniques such as imprinting of historical context, conflation, and stranging of perspective to connect their work with the paintings. I examine these methods of generating ekphrastic poems in order to evaluate how these poets have responded to one another and to consider emerging patterns of ekphrastic poetry in the twentieth century.

This research aims to illuminate how and why war challenges the limits of poetic representation, through an analysis of non-combatant poetry of the Second World War. It is motivated by the question: how can one portray, represent, or talk about war? Literature on war poetry tends to concentrate on the combatant poets of the First World War, or their influence, while literature on the Second World War tends to focus on prose as the only expression of literary war experience. With a historicist approach, this thesis advances our understanding of both the Second World War, and our inherited notions of 'war poetry,' by parsing its historiography, and investigating the role critical appraisals have played in marginalising this area of poetic response. This thesis examines four poets as case studies in this field of research-W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, and Stevie Smith-and evaluates them on both their individual explorations of poetic tone, faith systems, linguistic innovations, subversive performativity, and their collective trajectory towards a commitment to represent the war in their poetry. The findings from this research illustrate how too many critical appraisals have minimised or misrepresented Second World War poetry, and how the poets responded with a self-reflexivity that bespoke a deeper concern with how war is remembered and represented. The significance of these findings is breaking down the notion of objective fact in poetic representations of war, which are ineluctably subjective texts. These findings also offer insight into the 'failure' of poetry to represent war as a necessary part of war representation and prompt a rethinking of who has the 'right' experience-or simply the right-to talk about war.