Landscapes

Question 1

Auden said that the Bucolics were

Answer 1

‘about the relation of man as a history-making person to nature’

Question 2

Stephen Ross

Answer 2

‘knowingly artificial constructs’ ‘idealised landscape’

Question 3

Marchetti

Answer 3

‘the natural world is for Auden a place of unfreedom’

Question 4

When was ‘Streams’ written?

Answer 4

1953

Question 5

When was ‘Woods’ written?

Answer 5

1952

Question 6

“That _ Friday when [..] One bubble brained creature said I am loved therefore I am’ (Winds, 1953)

Answer 6

Pliocene

Question 7

When was Winds written?

Answer 7

1953

Question 8

“But the ___ winds that blow // Round law-court and temple’ (Winds)

Answer 8

Boneless

Question 9

Bucolics are examples of poetic representation of landscape drawn from ____________, and words themselves have a numinous value for the poet

Answer 9

the psychology of memory

Question 10

names in Bucolics

Answer 10

‘Earth, Sky, a few dear names’. (Winds)

‘Just reeling off their names is ever so comfy’ (Lakes)

Question 11

Fuller on landscapes

Answer 11

‘each geographical phenomena is invested… with a serious moral identity as a genius loci which assists or detracts from hi notion of the Good Life’

Question 12

Archambeau

Answer 12

characterises Auden’s landscapes as ‘a way of describing human psychological states’

Question 13

following Auden following Heard….

Answer 13

etymological poetry perceives the whole of language as using nature to describe human psychological states, motives and morals.

Question 14

John Whitehead

Answer 14

lauded In Praise of Limestone as ‘the first of a new genre which later degenerated into the laxer, more whimsical “Bucolics” series’.

Question 15

In Winds, while not as lexically experimental as his work was to become, Auden plays gleefully with the potentialities of the English language for the esoteric or bizarres:

Answer 15

“Pliocene” “insufflation” and “paterfamilias”

Question 16

(Winds) the ‘metropolis’ is the Fallen human city

Answer 16

Auden speculates as to whether the Fall would have occurred had God chosen one of the other members of the animal kingdom rather than man

Question 17

(Winds) the possibility of spiritual regeneration is indicated by…..

Answer 17

the fact that the wind blows round the Metropolis suggesting God’s breath of life can be renewed for mankind

Question 18

The second stanza of Winds attempts to embellish Auden’s edenic vision of the Good Place or the “Authentic City” by…

Answer 18

saying it would be a place where weather is almost aesthetically appreciated: ‘The first thing after breakfast, / A paterfamilias / Hurries to inspect his rain-gauge…’

Question 19

In Winds, weather is invested with a sense of sacred awe and the poet goes on….

Answer 19

to ask the wind, and the Muse, to give him divine inspiration in his work.

Question 20

What is the form of Woods?

Answer 20

rhymed iambic formality

Question 21

What does Fuller suggest about the rhymed iambic formality of Woods?

Answer 21

that this may be an ironic comment on society’s notion of its own decorum as opposed to the primitive

Question 22

examples of pragmatic modern images in Woods?

Answer 22

the hotel catering for dirty weekends, the demystifying idea of snapshots taken during picnics, Auden’s pan talks in morse code, his doves ‘rear their modern family of two’

Question 23

‘Though crown and Mitre warned their silly flocks / the pasture’s humdrum rhythms to approve/ And to abhor the licence of the grove’

Answer 23

the woods are a symbol of the anarchic in man’s life which he ignores at his peril

Question 24

For Auden, poetic representations of nature should be ‘done in anamnesis’

Answer 24

like a Christian sacrament or a Platonic re-awakening of primitive knowledge

Question 25

the ‘verbal rite’ is ‘done in amnamnesis’

Answer 25

of linguistic history so that every word is understood to be a significant repetition of a past usage

Question 26

By invoking etymology in ‘Woods’, Auden shows that each iteration introduces differences that are significant because they…

Answer 26

preserve the discontinuity and express the continuity in the ‘relation of man as a history-making person to nature’

Question 27

etymology of ‘savage’ shows an environment used to define a human condition

Answer 27

invokes Italian - Italian selva (‘woods’) intimately connected to selvaggio (‘savage’)

Question 28

what picture does Auden refer to in ‘Woods’

Answer 28

Piero di Cosimo’s painting ‘The Forest Fire’

Question 29

‘From which the matter of his field was made’ (Woods)

Answer 29

polysemy shows process of making an abstract word from a concrete name e.g. ‘savage’ from ‘sylvan’ or ‘rival’ from ‘river’- likened to the physical process of making paper an books from woods.

Question 30

‘A culture is no better than its woods’

Answer 30

Nature is needed to represent and create the ‘matter’ of language as well as the wood for books.

Question 31

Auden’s comedy lies in his ingenious imposition of __________.

Answer 31

a human pattern of interpretation upon phenomena

Question 32

What does the last stanza of Plains epitomise?

Answer 32

the masterly wit of the Bucolics in general, showcasing his dextrous interplay of one pattern of human interpretation of phenomena with another

Question 33

what do Plains represent for Auden?

Answer 33

a kind of spiritual malaise (‘two nightmares’) which helps to locate a personal fear

Question 34

spurious remark in Plains?

Answer 34

‘nothing is lovely, / Not even in poetry’

Question 35

‘nothing is lovely, /Not even in poetry, which is not the case’

Answer 35

having been at pains to distinguish between plains as a geographical feature and as a psychological metaphor, the poet pretends to confuse art and real life; the phrase ‘which is not the case’ corrects the deliberate distortion.

Question 36

the plains re depicted as nightmarish, but the representation itself is aesthetically pleasing

Answer 36

art reverses what it represents, as Auden writes of in ‘Caliban to the Audience’

Question 37

Richard Hoggart

Answer 37

all Auden’s poetic landscapes are moral rather than visual

Question 38

‘Streams’

Answer 38

an idyllic vision of streams, showing how art is the codifier and liberator of the imagination, culmination of the bucolics

Question 39

Fuller on Streams

Answer 39

the streams are ‘a sacramental blessing… it seems, as a prompter of the dream (the sound of Kisdon Beck), to be almost a sign of grace’

Question 40

tenth stanza of streams?

Answer 40

glimpse of an unfilled world: ‘innocent…. tells of a sort of world, quite other / altogether different from this one…;

Question 41

sixth stanza of streams?

Answer 41

streams are a metaphor of life which enables intellectual development and calls to mind an image of the poet’s beloved: ‘how could we liv e the absent one if you did not keep / coming from a distance’

Question 42

conceit of there sound of streams as language

Answer 42

the most well-spoken’ ‘same vocables you were using the day’ ‘still talk to yourself’

Question 43

dream dancing of the penultimate stanza of streams

Answer 43

linked to the sacred music and movement of the streams dance motif specific links in its religious connotations with ‘Compline’ of only a year later

Question 44

Callan on the form of streams

Answer 44

‘In imposing a strict form on it, Auden may have felt that since water leads quickly to the unconscious, and it does in this poem, he needed a highly conscious form to keep a tight rein on instinct’

Question 45

Streams form?

Answer 45

as Spears describes its, regular unrhymed quatrains

Question 46

language / form devices streams

Answer 46

highly complex, technical tour de force suggests the fluidity of water and its association with the instinctive aspect of man’s life, controlled within a tight technical framework

Question 47

what pattern does spears perceive in the form of Streams

Answer 47

a syllable within line one rhymes with a syllable in line three, and the final syllable of line one rhymes with the penultimate syllable of

Question 48

Streams uses a complex system of _____ _____ to suggest the quasi-religious harmony of the vision of the beloved inspired by the music of the streams

Answer 48

internal rhymes

Question 49

‘Figures of splendour’ (streams)

Answer 49

derives at least part of its power from the analogy with figures of speech which are, for Auden, central to sacred awe

Question 50

Callan: [Streams is] ‘remarkable for the complexity of its bubbling and swirling internal rhymes and _______ while, at the same time, remaining appropriately fluent’

Answer 50

assonance

Question 51

Marchetti on duality and multiple perspectives

Answer 51

‘if duality is the key to Auden’s poetry, the multiple perspectives offered by the image of parallel and coexisting geological strata, or of overlaid layers of paint in a painting, are the key to understanding his landscapes’

Question 52

What does Auden’s ‘nothing is lovely, / Not even in poetry, which is not the case’ recollect (who)?

Answer 52

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphorism that ‘The world is everything that is the case’