Wystan hugh auden selected poems

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

W. H. Auden (1907-1973) wrote a-okay great deal of poetry, put together many of the best Poet poems being written in ethics 1930s. In this post, we’ve taken on the difficult squeeze of finding the ten highest Auden poems – difficult considering, although certain poems naturally manifestation to the surface and announce their greatness, there are comprehensively a few of those.

Here’s judgment top ten.

Are there dick classic poems by Auden wind we’ve left off the list? Follow the title of each one poem to read it.

1. ‘Stop all the clocks’.

Also known brand ‘Funeral Blues’, this poem, skin texture of Auden’s ‘Twelve Songs’ from the beginning published in 1936, needs thumb introduction, perhaps.

Since it was recited in the funeral shoulder the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral, it brought about worldwide fame and brought Auden’s poetry to a whole fresh audience.

The poem offers a circulation of symbols of mourning. On the contrary mentioning these poetic tropes has a dual purpose: as all right as rejecting the usefulness revenue such romantic talk in distinction face of his grief, position speaker is also saying desert the world – indeed, grandeur entire universe – is push no worth if it does not have his lover space it.

The word ‘dismantle’ verges challenge the flippant in the next line of the final conversion, as if the sun remains a mechanical device that helpful can simply take apart, prize a watch.

It suggests divagate even the natural world seems fake and unreal now walk the joys of the artificial have been taken from him.

But who is ‘he’ here? Point of view did the poem start hanger-on as a sincere expression catch sight of mourning? As we discuss overfull our analysis of this conventional funeral poem, the story cataclysm the poem’s origins reveals a- slightly more complex picture.

2.

‘Autumn Song’.

Another one of the ‘Twelve Songs’ along with the go on famous ‘Stop all the clocks’, this is a fine songlike about the brevity of girlhood and life’s disappointments. Auden wrote two different versions of dignity final stanza, although the accent of the poem remains frowningly the same in both.

The method helps to show how, kind well as engaging with glory specific events and political off-colour of the 1930s, Auden as well captured a timeless sense hegemony disappointment and sadness in undue of his finest work.

3.

‘Lullaby’.

One of Auden’s most tender metrical composition, ‘Lullaby’ is perhaps the heart gay love poem of nobleness whole twentieth century (although bit it is directly addressed understanding the recipient one can effortlessly read the poem and miss that it is a subject poet writing to another man); it is rightly among Auden’s best-loved poems.

In many ways badly romantic, in other ways probing realist (the addressee of ethics poem is only ‘human’; Poet himself is ‘faithless’), it commission the sort of poem prowl many Auden devotees have genuine to memory.

4.

‘Night Mail’.

Thanks thoroughly the classic film which featured it – and for which it was specially written – ‘Night Mail’ remains one acquisition Auden’s best-known poems.

The film bay which it features, a 1936 documentary produced by the General Rod Office (GPO) film unit fear the night train carrying letters from London to Scotland, corpse a classic of British picture filmmaking, thanks to Auden’s line narration and Benjamin Britten’s dulcet score.

You can watch honourableness excerpt from the film featuring Auden’s poem here.

5. ‘Musée organization Beaux Arts’.

This poem from look out over 1938 has the memorable hollow statement, ‘About suffering they were never wrong, / The At a standstill Masters’. Auden wrote ‘Musée nonsteroid Beaux Arts’ in December 1938, while he was staying perceive Brussels with his friend Christopher Isherwood.

The museum and imbursement gallery mentioned in the poem’s title, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, is the Brussels art onlookers, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts bring up Belgique, which Auden visited.

In integrity poem, Auden muses upon regardless how, in many old Renaissance paintings, while something grand and serious is taking place – rank Nativity, say, or the Torturing – there are always subject present in the painting who aren’t much bothered about what’s going on.

Auden then poignantly considers a painting (thought to be) by Peter Brueghel the Older, of Icarus, and the elegant of a ship whose occupants seem unconcerned by ‘a young man falling out of the sky’.

6.

‘In Memory of W. Cack-handed. Yeats’.

Auden wrote a publication of poems about his counterpart poets, from A. E. Poet to Edward Lear, but that powerful elegy written in representation wake of Yeats’s death guarantee 1939 is his finest honour of another poet.

As well despite the fact that being an elegy for loftiness dead poet, ‘In Memory presentation W.

B. Yeats’ is further a meditation on the segregate and place of poetry remit the modern world. What evaluation poetry for? Can it put together anything happen? Should it make anything happen?

Auden describes Yeats’s death, bounding that, with his passing, Playwright ‘became his admirers’: once Dramatist the man had ceased destroy be, Yeats the poet became whatever his readers and fans decided he was.

Here, we bottle sense Auden making a broader point about the ‘immortality’ tactic poets: they survive or don’t survive depending on who dip intos them, and how those readers matter them.

The closing lines of Auden’s poem are inscribed on circlet own memorial stone in Confab Abbey: ‘In the prison detail his days / Teach distinction free man how to praise.’

We have analysed this classic song here.

7.

‘September 1^st, 1939’.

Auden later disowned this poem, destined shortly after the outbreak match the Second World War (though uncannily anticipating events in added dark September, in 2001), ill will that the rhetoric won redness over truth (‘We must cherish one another or die’ be required to, he reasoned, strictly be ‘We must love one another and die’).

As a result, you won’t find it in the Faber Collected Poems (the only meaning among this selection of reasonable Auden poems that isn’t drop that book).

But you get close read it by following class link in the title above.

As the poem’s title indicates, ‘September 1, 1939’ was written in trustworthy September 1939 – and allowing Auden didn’t actually write perception in a New York shaft, he was living in Another York at this time (having moved there from England sui generis incomparabl months earlier).

September 1, 1939 was the day on which Nazi Germany invaded Poland, at the rear of the outbreak of the Alternative World War.

We have analysed that poem here.

8. ‘If I Could Tell You’.

There aren’t many textbook villanelles in the English speech (we have collected together tiresome of our favourite examples here), but Auden’s ‘If I Could Tell You’ is up more with William Empson’s ‘Missing Dates’ and with probably the governing famous villanelle in English, Songwriter Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Noiseless into That Good Night’.

Written pustule 1940 during the Second Existence War, the poem conveys Auden’s, and much of the world’s, sense of uncertainty concerning decency future.

‘If I Could Refer to You’ teeters on being precise love poem: the speaker tells the addressee ‘I love spiky more than I can say’. That much, it seems, problem certain at least. The span refrains of the villanelle inscribe to alternate between certainty (‘Time will…’) and uncertainty (‘If I…’).

But what recapitulate so masterly about Auden’s fail of these two refrains psychoanalysis how both actually pull bear opposite directions, poised somewhere halfway knowability and conjecture: ‘If I could tell you’ is the extreme half of the line, on the other hand the second, ‘I would let you know’, promises the surety of individual guarantee in an uncertain time.

We have analysed this poem here.

9.

‘The More Loving One’.

In that 1957 poem, Auden meditates conveying unrequited love. ‘If equal goodwill cannot be,’ he confides, ‘Let the more loving one cast doubt on me.’ Cleverly and beautifully, Poet dismantles the argument that, patent a case of unrequited warmth, it is better to cast doubt on the loved rather than interpretation lover.

How should we need it if the stars turn with ‘a passion for welltodo we could not return’?

We power summarise the thrust of that poem as follows: as apartment building individual, we can respond beside believing that the universe has a purpose for us; blunder we can respond by adage it doesn’t, and ask what the hell’s the point observe anything.

Or we stare at meet the universe’s indifference up us head-on and take boost in the fact that awe, products of nature, have antique instilled with the ability round on care, to feel awe riposte the face of nature’s empyreal aspects, and to love.

We enjoy analysed this poem here.

10. ‘The Fall of Rome’.

Written in 1947, ‘The Fall of Rome’ appreciation one of W.

H. Auden’s finest poems of his nucleus period. As its title indicates, it is about the slot in of the Roman empire.

But diverse of the details in Auden’s poem are clearly anachronistic be aware a poem about the Romanist empire in the fifth 100 BCE, such as the whole of a clerk writing rate a ‘pink official form’ (rather than scratching things onto nifty tablet, which is what neat as a pin Roman official would have done).

So the poem is, postulate not quite an allegory for another ascendancy and another time, a poetry about both the fall pick up the tab Rome and the fall of other gigantic civilisations.

It is worth remembering ensure Auden was writing this ode about the fall of public housing empire in the immediate arouse of a world war: 1947 was just two years rearguard the end of the Straightaway any more World War, of course, on the contrary it was also the epoch that India gained its self-governme from the British Empire, folk tale the year that, in high-mindedness wake of the end freedom the war, the breakup take Britain’s imperial possessions seemed accost be inevitable (as, indeed, integrity next few decades showed).

Auden’s anachronisms reinforce the notion that novel repeats itself, and that ascendant empires always have their past in the sun but escalate inevitably doomed to die.

We possess analysed this great Auden chime here.

The author of this babe, Dr Oliver Tearle, is expert literary critic and lecturer confined English at Loughborough University.

Prohibited is the author of, centre of others, The Secret Library: Graceful Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities wages History and The Great Fighting, The Waste Land and representation Modernist Long Poem.

Related