Auden's Memorial for the City

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0 (B), University of Regensburg (Faculty for Literature and Cultural Studies), course: Hauptseminar: W.H. Auden, language: English, abstract: The origins of a critical view on the focal points of civilizations may be traced back in history veryfar. Perfect examples of ancient critique on urban life may be found in the Old Testament, e.g. thedepiction of the civilizations of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah. The metaphorical content of theseexamples seems fairly clear: the reader is confronted with societies that either directly challenge theauthority of God or don t follow his Commandments and are therefore punished by a divine fatherfigure, which restores the natural and spiritual order. However, from the beginning, the city motivemay also be seen as well as a means of discourse on mankind s cultural and social output. Butmodern city poetry is of course different from the ancient accounts of God s wrath, which lead tocatastrophes for one city or the other. Its roots are to be found in the works of major eighteenthcentury poets, e.g. William Blake s London, in which he seems to recognize a new form of disorderbeing at work within the city limits. The nineteenth century brought forth poets like Wordsworth,who carried on to work on the theme but showed a different attitude towards the city. Because of itsever growing dimension, it was then perceived as a totally new and symbolic phenomenon, whichraised philosophical questions about the state of society and the poet s role within this complex. Thetone of the responses to these questions was for the most part uncertain and personal. Finally,thetwentieth century gave birth to a new kind of urban literature and poetry, with a symbolic meaningof the city motive, which was as varied as the ethnical, religious, social and political shades of thehuman community it referred to. Nevertheless, two tendencies may be observed within modernpoetry and prose, the first one dealing with the content of the city symbol: When the city ceases tobe a symbol of art and order, writes Lewis Mumford, it acts in a negative fashion: it expresses andhelps to make more universal the fact of disintegration. 1 The second one is the mode major poetssuch as T.S. Eliot in his famous The Waste Land attempt to cope with the reality of the twentiethcentury city: a controlling framework of myth, literature and history is employed in order to dealwith the chaotic nature of their theme. Both points are to some extent true particularly for Auden slater works. [...]1 Johnston (1984: 246).