In Memory of W.B Yeats Flashcards
nightmarish European landscape of desolation, cold and entropy
the landscape is criss-crossed by congealed and arrested flows: brooks (figuratively springs of creativity and desire) are ‘frozen’, ‘snow’ effaces physical controls, the thermometer’s mercury becomes vacuous and ‘sinks’ as the temperature drops
‘it survives’
poetry survives and gives voice to survival in a space of isolation
‘flows south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs’
Auden makes his relocation to America explicit as in Europe American words like ‘ranches’ would have seemed literally out of place
Like all elegies…
it is as much concerned with the future as with the past.
what does it elegise?
the poet about whom he had decidedly mixed feelings; his own former style; a vatic, politically instrumental conception of the poet’s role within culture; the link that bounds Yeats’ and his own poetry to collective national traditions
what is its form?
an elegy organised into three sections
three sections outline
- Mournful Section: long breath-based Whitmanian
- Speaker reflects on generative power of poetry; free-verse
- Six stanzas of AABB verse, every line in seven-syllable trochaic verse
what is the first section?
Mournful Section: long breath-based Whitmanian
what is the second section?
free verse
what is the third section?
familiar six stanzas of AABB verse, every line in seven-syllable trochaic verse; ceremonial quatrains in tetrameter
what is the form of the third section?
ceremonial quatrains in tetrameter
what else changes in the form of the third section?
rhyme enters, prose rhythms give way to a ceremonial lyric language
James Persoon
‘two elements - the poet’s death as national and natural crisis and the poet’s death as almost completely insignificant - describe a tension within which Auden explores the life of the work after the death of the author.’
‘poetry makes nothing happen’
you could contrast this modesty with Pound at the same time broadcasting his ideas on Fascist radio.
‘each in the cell of himself’
recalls the locked chambers of Eliot’s The Waste Land
