Critically Examine Auden’s Treatment of War and Imageries with Special References to his Poetry
The English-born American poet Wystan Hugh Auden was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century in English literature. His works focused on moral issues and shows the strong political, social, and psychological beliefs. W. H. Auden was born on February 21, 1907, in York. He was the last of three sons. His father worked as medical officer at Birmingham. His mother was an Anglican. The combinations of both religious and scientific themes are underlined throughout Auden's work. He disliked the nineteenth-century emotional style of writing. Auden was the first poet in English to use the imagery and the terminology of clinical psychoanalysis too.…show more content… Auden used dark and negative tone, there is no proper sequence of one stanza to another to depict on war. Very first stanza of the poem shows the effect of the war to people and poet is trying to give the images to the reader what war has done. The poem plays an essential role in telling the history of world war ll because it was the first civil war that lead to a world war. In this poem Auden gives the consequences of the announcement of war. Auden himself was in New York when he heard the news and thus, he explores the ironies of people hearing about an event didn’t shock them rather went out drinking and celebrating life. The poem uses the tone and metre of a Yeats’ poem ‘Easter 1916.’ That is negative tone. The poem is combined with academic and classical references and looks at the range of private and public disasters that lead to war. The imagery of “A Psychopathic God” refers to the Hitler who first started the evil and destruction at Poland which gradually lead to world…show more content… Poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Auden gave us their pure firsthand experience of war and described the major effects of both physical and mental upon those who participate in war. The war images are portrayed consecutively in his work of “The Shield of Achilles” “September 1, 1939” and “Spain.” The Modernist poets commonly used concrete imagery and free verse to touch upon the same theme of futility each in his own way such as Auden used in his poetry where he lament the tragic condition of the modern man. He expressed his dislike for a corrupt government, suspicion of science without human feeling, and also his belief in a Christian god. His constant subject on the wars happening within the world made him to write the poems pouring all his emotions and tyranny occurring in a