AUDEN

While T. S. Eliot was the key-figure of the Twenties, AUDEN was the key figure of the thirties.

The thirties were a period of political and social UNREST- economic crisis, unemployment, the rise of Nazism and Fascism.

The poetry of the time was mostly COMMITTED.          

When Auden started writing his poems he seemed to be very pessimistic. He realized he was living in a time characterized by terrible events, but he also believed that something could be made to create a better world in the hope that a generation of society would be possible. His poetry may be divided in two periods.

In his early poems he sympathized with the Left-wing movements, considering the poet a public voice, giving voice to the oppressed, the weaker and the persecuted. Poetry was definitely seen as an instrument to spread political messages.

At the time he was the leader of the Oxford group, whose members were also Louis Mc Niece, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis.

He was influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism.

He mainly dealt with the horrors of his time: dictatorship and the mad quest for world domination, citizenship and national identity, the fall of the masses under their leaders' spell, the terrible effects of the bureaucratic state (reducing people to statistics and figures), the Spanish Civil War, the bleakness and perhaps impossibility of the future, the martyrdom of heroes and the death of poets, the improper use of modern tools.

Later on, after his moving to the USA, in 1939, he moved away from Marxism to return to his childhood religion, Anglicanism.

He started thinking that improvement is connected with the self, not with society. Now he mainly dealt with themes like love, friendship, death, nature, religious beliefs.

Auden used different verse forms and poetic genres-sonnet, lyric, narrative poem, ballad , blues. He also tended to use irony and humour even when considering serious issues of modern life.