Notes on Drowning: Eliot and Auden

HUM 2213: British and American Literature IISpring 2013Dr. Perdigao

January 30-February 1, 2013

About Suffering• “Prufrock”

• “Musée des Beaux Arts”

• Notion of suffering, human condition

• Ideas about civilization, between Yeats, Eliot, Auden, extending beyond Ireland, England, America

• Insiders/outsiders

• Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a war to end all wars but inevitability of WWII

• Idea of politics, aesthetics, western civilization as a whole

• Immediacy of experience, impersonality

Falling

http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/philolog/2005/11/ekphrasis_ovid_in_pieter_breug.html

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)• Born in York, England; educated at Christ Church, Oxford

• Moved to U.S. in 1939, became an American citizen in 1946

• “from T. S. Eliot he took a conversational and ironic tone, an acute inspection of cultural decay” (Greenblatt 2421)

• Great Depression, Waste Land, draws on Freud and Marx; England as “nation of neurotic invalids, now as the victim of an antiquated economic system” (2421)

• Rejection of Yeats’ notion of poetry as transcendent, redemptive, the prophetic role of poetry