An Affirming Flame:
the poetry of W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden: English, American, Christian, Marxist, Freudian, modernist, formalist, married gay poet -- Auden possessed in his own person more diversity than a roomful of his contemporaries. We will explore this immensely charming, funny, tragic, difficult poet over the course of his life’s work. We will study in depth the early experimental work that made him famous and the great ballads and songs of his most popular period, and we will look at a selection of the late poems, where Auden continues to refuse to give his readers what they expect. This will be a seminar for lovers of poetry and anyone who has always been curious as to why other people like it. Auden has something for everyone.
“LIVES THAT OBEY YOU MOVE LIKE MUSIC, BECOMING
NOW WHAT THEY ONLY
CAN BE ONCE, MAKING
OF SILENCE DECISIVE SOUND: IT SOUNDS
EASY, BUT ONE MUST
FIND THE TIME.”
“Homage to Clio,” Auden
LEADER
Rosemary Gould currently
raises three small children in
Charlottesville, Virginia. In her spare time she leads discussions of
poetry for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and even gets a chance to read alone with a cup of tea every now and then. But Auden deserves to be read in company.
BOOK
Participants are required to
obtain the specified editions in order to facilitate the group’s ability to find and cite portions of the text during discussion.
Selected Poems, W.H. Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson, Vintage (2007)
ISBN-10: 0307278085
ISBN-13: 978-0307278081
Please make sure you get the SELECTED poems, not the Collected; they are very different.
Here are the poems we will concentrate on. We will study a maximum of 5 poems each day (probably less), but I hope you will want to look at others in the book also.
Monday: #2 "From the very first coming down," #3 "Control of the passes was, he saw, the key," #7 "Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all," #11 "This lunar beauty," #12 "To ask the hard question is simple"
Tuesday: #15 "'O where are you going?' said reader to rider," #20 "Out on the lawn I lie in bed," #27 "Look, stranger, at this island now," #36 "Lay your sleeping head, my love," #43 "As I walked out one evening"
Wednesday 3: #44 "Oxford," #45 "O Tell Me the Truth About Love," #48 "Musee des Beaux Arts," #50 "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," #51 "Refugee Blues"
Thursday: #54 "September 1, 1939," #55 "Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,"
#56 "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," #67 "Mundus et Infans," #73 "The Fall of Rome"
Friday: #74 "In Praise of Limestone," #83 "The Shield of Achilles," #89 "Homage to Clio," #93 "The More Loving One," #117 "A Lullaby"
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