There is no abstract available for this thesis.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

Much of W. H. Auden's most brilliantly evocative poetry was written during the 1930's. His skill in catching the tones, the topics of his time, and his ability to evoke its moods and its social turbulence are unequalled among those of his generation writing of political unrest, international crises and revolution. It is no surprise that the word "Audenesque" has become part of the language of literary criticism describing a particular poetic style. Yet it was his poetry of the '30's that Auden later in his life revised and/or repudiated, creating textual problems involving basic critical issues related to literary interpretation, readers'responses to much-revised poems, and to the way that textual scholars approach the determinate relations among poems as first printed and subsequent, altered versions that are also authoritative. Traditional textual criticism cannot address all of the problems caused by Auden's extensive overhauling, nor can it provide evidence that some of Auden's harshest critics--the British Scrutiny group headed by F. R. Leavis and American critics Joseph Warren Beach and Randall Jarrell--may have dismissed him as a major poet too soon. But a method of textual treatment called versioning--the presentation of the complete texts of two or more different stages of a literary work--may be the most useful and efficient method of textual treatment for authors like Auden, and for readers and critics who might wish to assess the significance of Auden's revised works by comparing them with original texts. / Department of English

The more attentively Auden's poetry is studied, the more one critical problem emerges. How can the poet of the "twenties and ' thirties be reconciled with the poet of the last three decades? "We've all got to come to terms with the later Auden" writes Professor Richard Hoggart, but he does not explain how. The man who wrote the pungent early poetry with its constant reiteration of warnings to a sick society that what was needed was " … death, death of the grain, our death, Death of the old gang … " before it could achieve "new styles of architecture, a change of heart", seems an entirely different person from the man who is on the side of Authority to-day; that is to say in so far as Auden can ever be said to be definitely on one side or another. Intro. p. 1.

How does a poet fare nowadays at the hands of his critics? This study examines the critical reception Auden received from 1930 to 1960; through a close consideration of a selection of the poems written in this period it will be demonstrated that a considerble discrepency exists between Auden's poetic achievement and. the criticism it received. The main reason for this discrepancy is the lack of attention to individual poems in favour of sweeping surveys of a volume of poetry or the poet's total output. The core of the thesis lies here and the thesis as a whole derives from concern for a poet's reputation during his poetic career.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

This thesis addresses the impact of religious conversion on the later works of Eliot and Auden, and the manner in which they responded to each other as they developed a Christian poetics. Following an introduction which discusses the nature of their relationship as well as their basic theological positions, Chapter One examines their postconversion criticism, and particularly their stance on what is typically formulated as "the problem of belief in poetry," which focuses on how ideology influences a work's creation and reception. Chapter Two considers their transitional poetry, wherein their new religious beliefs figure prominently and their anxiety over the potential conflict between artistic and spiritual values is most acute. Chapter Three looks at their major postconversion poems and specifically at how Eliot's and Auden's understanding of the Incarnation informs their views on time, history, language, and literature, as embodied by these works. Chapter Four centers on their drama, initially comparing their early plays---written when Eliot was a Christian but Auden was not---to show how they employed similar techniques to further different ends, before turning to an examination of Eliot's later verse plays and Auden's libretti. I investigate the ideological motivation behind the adoption of these different dramatic forms, as well as the specific ways in which they affect how belief is conveyed. Throughout the dissertation, the effects of Eliot's and Auden's conversion upon their reputations and the difficulties facing modern Christian artists in general are given particular consideration.

No description available.

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.