Thesis (Ph.D.)--Baylor University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 326-330).

No description available.

No description available.

<p>This thesis focuses on W.H. Auden's last four major volumes of poetry: About the House (1965), City Without Walls (1969), Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the posthumous Thank You, Fog (1974). The later poetry has not drawn much scholarly attention or praise, and my study should go part way to redressing the balance.</p> <p>My thesis is that Auden's Christianity profoundly affected every aspect of his later poetry, though most of it is not overtly religious. Many features peculiar to this poetry--the giving of praise for even the simplest things, the delight in words from the slangiest to the most esoteric, the love of challenging prosodic difficulties, and the comic and playful exuberance --are all influenced by (or are actually the result of) the practice of a form of Christianity known as the Affirmative Way. Two main elements of this Way are a concentration on the goodness of all creation and an attempt to see every aspect of existence in its relation to God. Auden manifests a counterbalancing asceticism in aesthetic matters, however, in his rejection of mellifluousness for its own sake, of the pleasures and self-indulgence of 11 Confessional 11 writings, of the excitements of hierophantic utterance, and of any idea or element of style he felt to be subversive of the truth.</p> <p>The attempt to find the dynamic and necessary link between an expansive vision of life and the guidance of a vigorous discipline is the keynote to Auden's career. It extends into all the antinomies around which his thought was organized, and for which he attempted to discover reconciliations --the "Spirit" of Christian love and the "Letter" of Mosaic law; freedom and necessity; history and nature; the subject ego and the predicate self within each person; soul and body; and, though hardly exhausting what could be a very long list, the words of man and the Logos, the Word of God. All this is reflected in Auden's love of writing within the restrictions of formal verse patterns, and Auden takes the idea of patterning one step further by organizing three of his later volumes into fairly complex, overall structures. These are all designed to frame a particular element of the Christian story, and again reveal the extent of Auden's desire to make his words bear witness to the Word. (</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

abstract: This dissertation makes the case to reclaim the typically negative term, coterie, as a poetic method and offers the epithalamium as a valuable object for the study of coterie conditions and values. This examination of the historical poetics of the epithalamium shows how the form was reappropriated by gay postwar poets and those in related social circumstances. This study applies and builds on theories developed by Arthur Marotti (John Donne: Coterie Poet), and Lytle Shaw (Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie) and subsequent critics to develop a coterie poetics, the markers and terms for which I have arranged here to demonstrate conscious "sociable" poetics. It is thus to our advantage to study coterie conditions and methods to open readers to insights into twentieth-century poets that have deliberately exploited reception among those in private and public spheres, just as their Early-Modern precursors did--often as a matter of survival, but also as formative practice. The key figures in this study wrote significant epithalamia or made major theoretical claims for coterie poetics: John Donne (1572-1631), W. H. Auden (1907-1973), Paul Goodman (1910-1972), and Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). O'Hara's poetry is approached as the apex of coterie poetics; his personal immediacy and obscure personal references should alienate and exclude--yet, they invite. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012

This thesis is an account of the poet and critic W.H. Auden's relations with Germany and Germans over the course of his life (1907-1973), presented through a selection of influences that have received little critical attention in the corpus of secondary literature to date. While these connections and influences are manifold and sometimes disparate, they can serve as a prism to tell Auden's life-story from a particular, relatively unexplored angle and to illuminate his work. The thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter One discusses Auden’s engagement with German literature before 1928, his reasons for spending nine months in Weimar Berlin 1928-29, and the formative influence of this experience on his life and work. Chapter Two explores Auden's relationship with his 'in-laws', the famous family of Nobel Prize winning author Thomas Mann, and Auden's choice of an international life-style. Chapter Three discusses various other, later German influences on Auden: his visit to Germany with the US Army and its traces in The Age of Anxiety; issues concerning the German translation of this text; his Ford Foundation residence in isolated West Berlin; and his intellectual friendship with Hannah Arendt. Introduction and Conclusion embed these three specific chapters, deliberating the topic more abstractly. A number of appendices bring together a wide range of unpublished sources – and their translations into English, if the original is composed in German. Translations of all German appendix material can be found in the appendix itself.