Hi again,

I am trying to writing a paper about the English-born American writer W.H.Auden.

What I want to do is to take a poem, one of his most important, and to complile critics about it. "Some critics feel that Auden's first books, Poems (1930) and The Orators, an English Study (1932), contain some of his finest work" But I don't know what poem to choose to find critics about it and where I can find those critics.

Javier, Google has quite a few hits on the subject:

[www.google.com] />

Les

I would go with Shield of Achilles. Note the different language used in the separate stanzas, as he switches from historical to (then) present views. The roots of the words, that is, and their sounds. Some stanzas are mostly single syllables, others multiple; some have Anglo-Saxon roots, others Latin.

The formatting will not work on this site, but I took the copy below from,

[tinyurl.com] />

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.


For other critics (critiques?), Google again has lots of suggestions:

[tinyurl.com]

Oh, heck, that one is from around 1950. You wanted very early works. Lemme look around some more. Museé de Beaux Arts is another good choice, but I think it was from circa 1940.

In a bio at the front of 9 Modern Poets (MacMillan 1966), it says Auden once seemed a Marxist poet, and went on to say how he was sympathetic to the ideals of the Communists, but never joined the party. While an undergraduate at Oxford Auden led a group of writers including Isherwood, Spender, Macneice, & Day Lewis. On graduating he went to Berlin for a year, then returned to Britain and published his first volume of poems in 1930. After 5 years of teaching he worked for 6 months on Night Mail for the GPO film unit, then in 1937 went to the Spanish Civil War, on to China with Isherwood in 1938 and after going through the USA on the way to and from China and being attracted by the country , he emigrated (again with Isherwood) to the USA in 1939. It goes on to say that the poems he wrote in the 1930s stressed the tragedy of unemployment and presented melancholy pictures of 'harvests rotting in the valleys' and furnaces gasping in the impossible air' - a number describing in a kind of nightmare , the bare dramatic fells of Northern England (where he spent his holidays as a boy - and where I live, by the bye and it isn't a nightmare at all!) and the abandoned lead mines left by the Romans and the Industrial Revolution. It says that the worst of these early poems are badly dated and the best have a more durable vitality. He quotes 'The Quarry' as efeectively expressing the fear or concentration camps or an approaching world war that darkened the 'low dishonest decade' of the 1930s. The author of this biographical piece - probably E L Black as he selected and edited the whole book - ecommends A Summer Night (1933), Birthday Poem, the Sonnet on Housman, Who's Who. Song for St Cecelia;s Day and Stop All the Clocks as demonstrating his versitility at this time.

If you can get hold of this book, it might be worth reading the whole bio (about 5 pages long) - otherwise, try some of the poems mentioned above. Night Mail is one of the most popular and well known Auden poems to 'ordinary Brits' and Stop All the Clocks became extremely famous and much sought after when used in the film 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'

Hope that helps.

I looked around the net for a table of contents listing poems of the three early books mentioned, but to no avail. If the premise is that these volumes contained some of his best work, lemme know some of those titles and I can maybe help some more.

I know very little about WHA, but I just found out that this book exists:

The Map Of All My Youth: Early Works, Friends And Influences
(auden Studies, Vol 1)
By W. H. Auden, Et Al (hardcover - December 1990)

That could be very useful!

As another suggestion, one of his longer poems might give you more scope for study and critique; like "Paid on Both Sides" which was first published in 1930 and then later that year included in his book "Poems." It's a verse play written in various forms.
A quick google search came up with a few references like this one

[english.cla.umn.edu] />
good luck,
rikki