Written Assignment: American Literature

 1. What does Transcendentalism mean? 

Ans :-

Overview :-

• The philosophy of transcendentalism arose in the 1830s in the eastern United States as a reaction to intellectualism. Its adherents yearned for intense spiritual experiences and sought to transcend the purely material world of reason and rationality.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were two of the most famous and influential transcendentalists.
• Some influential transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller, were early pioneers of feminism.

The philosophy of transcendentalism :-

The philosophy of transcendentalism originated in Unitarianism, the predominant religious movement in Boston in the early 19th century. Unitarianism was a liberal Christian sect that emphasized rationality, reason, and intellectualism; it was especially popular at Harvard.

The transcendentalists who established the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1836—mostly Unitarian clergy and Boston-area intellectuals—did not reject Unitarianism but yearned for a more spiritual experience to balance out the emphasis on pure reason. The very word transcendentalism refers to a spirituality that transcends the realm of rationality and the material world. Transcendentalists believed that humans were fundamentally good but corrupted by society and that they should therefore strive for independence and self-reliance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were two of the most famous transcendentalists. In 1845, Thoreau moved to a cabin that he built on Walden Pond in Massachusetts and lived there for two years, two months, and two days. He chronicled the experience in his book Walden, published in 1854, which explored the themes of nature, spirituality, self-reliance, and the simple life. Thoreau acknowledged the debt transcendentalism owed to Indian religious beliefs by paying homage to the Bhagavad Gita, a Sanskrit epic that is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.”

Emerson gained fame as an essayist and public lecturer; his 1836 essay “Nature” laid out many of the tenets of the transcendentalist philosophy. He suggested that God could be found in nature and that spending time in nature was the closest man could come to the divine. Another of Emerson’s most famous works was the 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” a defense of individualism, which emphasized nonconformity and personal responsibility. One of Emerson’s most famous quotes, a denunciation of mindless conformity, comes from this essay: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Women and transcendentalism:-

Other influential transcendentalists were feminist pioneers. Margaret Fuller, a journalist and women’s rights advocate, edited The Dial, which was first published in 1840 and served as the primary journal of the transcendentalists until 1844. She was a frequent contributor to the journal and in 1845 published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an early feminist manifesto that may have inspired the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—the first conference in America devoted to the issue of women’s rights.

Other prominent female transcendentalists include Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who served as the business manager of The Dial and in 1860 established the first English-language kindergarten in the United States, and Louisa May Alcott, author of the classic novel Little Women.

Transcendentalism and reform :-

By the 1850s, many transcendentalists had become subsumed in the struggle to abolish slavery. As the incorporation of new territories into the Union exacerbated sectional tensions, the slavery issue dominated New England intellectual circles. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in keeping with his reverence for individual freedom, became a vocal abolitionist and spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Law—which provided for the return of runaway slaves—and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854—which held that settlers in Kansas and Nebraska would be the ones to decide whether those states would become slave states or free.

Because the leading transcendentalists began to focus their efforts on eliminating chattel slavery, transcendentalism faded from the scene by the 1850s. The ideas and writings of the transcendentalists, however, continued to inspire later reform movements, including the movement for women's suffrage, and the labor movement.
Ralph Waldo Emerson :-

A religious, philosophical and literary movement, Transcendentalism arose in New England in the middle of the nineteenth century. Critics generally cite 1836 to 1846 as the years when the movement flourished, although its influence continued to be felt in later decades, with some works considered part of the movement not being published until the 1850s. Transcendentalism began as a religious concept rooted in the ideas of American democracy. When a group of Boston ministers, one of whom was Ralph Waldo Emerson, decided that the Unitarian Church had become too conservative, they espoused a new religious philosophy, one which privileged the inherent wisdom in the human soul over church doctrine and law.

Among Transcendentalism’s followers were writers Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman; educator Bronson Alcott; and social theorists and reformers Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing. Authors Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allen Poe also felt the influence of Transcendentalism. Important works from the movement include Emerson’s Nature, “The American Scholar,” and “Self Reliance”; Thoreau’s Walden; Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century; and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Novels such as Melville’s Moby Dick and Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance also had transcendentalist leanings.

It is no coincidence that this movement took off just as the American literary tradition was beginning to blossom. Transcendentalism—though inspired by German and British Romanticism—was a distinctly American movement in that it was tied into notions of American individualism. In addition to the theme of American democracy, transcendentalist literature also promotes the idea of nature as divine and the human soul as inherently wise. Transcendentalism also had a political dimension, and writers such as Thoreau put their transcendentalist beliefs into action through acts of civil disobedience to the government. The nineteenth century was a volatile one, beginning with the hope and promise of democracy and the development of an American identity and moving towards mass devastation and division by the middle of the century. Slavery and the Civil War, women’s rights, growing industrialism and class division— all of these events were influential and each had a role to play in the transcendentalist movement.

 Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe”. Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.

What we now know as transcendentalism first arose among the liberal New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism in two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of human striving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and inescapable human depravity; and they emphasized the unity rather than the “Trinity” of God (hence the term “Unitarian,” originally a term of abuse that they came to adopt.) Most of the Unitarians held that Jesus was in some way inferior to God the Father but still greater than human beings; a few followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) in holding that Jesus was thoroughly human, although endowed with special authority. The Unitarians’ leading preacher, William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a religion of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved human beings from sin, not just from punishment. His sermon “Unitarian Christianity” (1819) denounced “the conspiracy of ages against the liberty of Christians”and helped give the Unitarian movement its name. In “Likeness to God” (1828) he proposed that human beings “partake” of Divinity and that they may achieve “a growing likeness to the Supreme Being” .

An important source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Frederic Henry Hedge (1805–90). Hedge’s father Levi Hedge, a Harvard professor of logic, sent him to preparatory school in Germany at the age of thirteen, after which he attended the Harvard Divinity School. Ordained as a Unitarian minister, Hedge wrote a long review of the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the Christian Examiner in 1833. Noting Coleridge’s fondness for “German metaphysics” and his immense gifts of erudition and expression, he laments that Coleridge had not made Kant and the post-Kantians more accessible to an English-speaking audience. This is the task—to introduce the “transcendental philosophy” of Kant, that Hedge takes up. In particular, he explains Kant’s idea of a Copernican Revolution in philosophy: “since the supposition that our intuitions depend on the nature of the world without, will not answer, assume that the world without depends on the nature of our intuitions.” This “key to the whole critical philosophy,” Hedge continues, explains the possibility of “a priori knowledge”. Hedge organized what eventually became known as the Transcendental Club, by suggesting to Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion group for disaffected young Unitarian clergy. The group included George Ripley and Bronson Alcott, had some 30 meetings in four years, and was a sponsor of The Dial and Brook Farm. Hedge was a vocal opponent of slavery in the 1830s and a champion of women’s rights in the 1850s, but he remained a Unitarian minister, and became a professor at the Harvard Divinity School.

Another source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Germaine de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker) (1766–1817), whose De l’Allemagne (On Germany) was a favorite of the young Emerson. In a sweeping survey of European metaphysics and political philosophy, de Staël praises Locke’s devotion to liberty, but sees him as the originator of a sensationalist school of epistemology that leads to the skepticism of Hume. She finds an attractive contrast in the German tradition that begins with Leibniz and culminates in Kant, which asserts the power and authority of the mind.

The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects it classifies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This manner of looking at things, transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness. Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps the most logical expounder of materialism, was constrained to say, "Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought that we perceive." What more could an idealist say?

The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show him, that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions, to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense. The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, -- a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. And this wild balloon, in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole state and faculty. One thing, at least, he says is certain, and does not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the multiplication table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and, moreover, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow; -- but for these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They change and pass away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform experience will continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of stone.

In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance. The materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, social art, and luxury, every establishment, every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or amount of objects, every social action. The idealist has another measure, which is metaphysical, namely, the rank which things themselves take in his consciousness; not at all, the size or appearance. Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena. Although in his action overpowered by the laws of action, and so, warmly cooperating with men, even preferring them to himself, yet when he speaks scientifically, or after the order of thought, he is constrained to degrade persons into representatives of truths. He does not respect labor, or the products of labor, namely, property, otherwise than as a manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the laws of being; he does not respect government, except as far as it reiterates the law of his mind; nor the church; nor charities; nor arts, for themselves; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His thought, -- that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre of him.

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Works Cited :-

1.“Transcendentalism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transcendentalism. Accessed 13 Jun. 2021.
2."Transcendentalism." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2021. Web. 13 Jun 2021. <https://www.definitions.net/definition/Transcendentalism>.
3. "What does Transcendentalism mean?" eNotes Editorial, 8 Sep. 2010, https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-does-mean-transcendentalism-195835. Accessed 13 June 2021.

Written Assignment: 20 Cen Lit - 2

  1. Critically appreciate the poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ ?

Ans :-

William Butler Yeats  (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) :-

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms.Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was a very good friend of Indian Bengali poet Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

Yeats was born and educated in Dublin, but spent his childhood in County Sligo.He studied poetry in his youth and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which asted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889 and those slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.

In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was determined to make the most of the occasion. He was aware of the symbolic value of an Irish winner so soon after Ireland had gained independence, and sought to highlight the fact at each available opportunity. His reply to many of the letters of congratulations sent to him contained the words: "I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe's welcome to the Free State." Yeats used the occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to present himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence. As he remarked, "The theatres of Dublin were empty buildings hired by the English travelling companies, and we wanted Irish plays and Irish players. When we thought of these plays we thought of everything that was romantic and poetical, because the nationalism we had called up—the nationalism every generation had called up in moments of discouragement—was romantic andpoetical." The prize led to a significant increase in the sales of his books, as his publishers Macmillan sought to capitalise on the publicity. For the first time he had money, and he was able to repay not only his own debts, but those of his father.

By early 1925, Yeats' health had stabilised, and he had completed most of the writing for "A Vision" (dated 1925, it actually appeared in January 1926, when he almost immediately started rewriting it for a second version). He had been appointed to the first Irish Senate in 1922, and was re-appointed for a second term in 1925. Early in his tenure, a debate on divorce arose, and Yeats viewed the issue as primarily a confrontation between the emerging Roman Catholic ethos and the Protestant minority. When the Roman Catholic Church weighed in with a blanket refusal to consider their anti position, the Irish Times countered that a measure to outlaw divorce would alienate Protestants and "crystallise" the partition of Northern Ireland.

His language became more forceful; the Jesuit Father Peter Finlay was described by Yeats as a man of "monstrous discourtesy", and he lamented that, "It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have put our Bishops in their place in discussions requiring legislation". During his time in the Senate, Yeats further warned his colleagues: "If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North ... You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation". He memorably said of his fellow Irish Protestants, "we are no petty people".

He died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939. He was buried after a discreet and private funeral at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Yeats and George had often discussed his death, and his express wish was that he be buried quickly in France with a minimum of fuss. According to George, "His actual words were 'If I die bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year's time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo'." In September 1948, Yeats' body was moved to Drumcliffe, County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette LÉ Macha. Interestingly, the person in charge of this operation for the Irish Government was Sean MacBride, son of Maud Gonne MacBride, and then Minister of External Affairs. His epitaph is taken from the last lines of "Under Ben Bulben", one of his final poems:

Cast a cold Eye

On Life, on Death.

Horseman, pass by!

Attempts had been made at Roquebrune to dissuade the family from proceeding with the removal of the remains to Ireland due to the uncertainty of their identity. His body had earlier been exhumed and transferred to the ossuary.

In memory of W.B. Yeats:-

Friends often share stories or poems of loved one at their funeral. This helps to ease their pain and can also express accomplishments of the deceased. When W.B. Yeats passed away, one of his contemporaries, W.H. Auden, wrote a poem in memory of him. Auden?s poem entitled In Memory of W.B. Yeats, presents the life of Yeats from Auden?s perspective in three different sections. Using literary techniques such as diction, varied meter and rhyme, alliteration, and personification, Auden comments on poetry and its ability to outlive its author.
Each of the three sections of this poem is different. The first section is composed of five stanzas each containing six lines. This mainly touches on the death of Yeats and contains neither meter nor rhyme. The second section is one stanza composed of ten lines and is a transitional section showing the human aspect of Yeats. It is written in iambic hexameter with a rhyme scheme of abbaccdeed. The last section is made up of nine stanzas each only four lines long. It is written mostly in iambic meter, although each line contains seven syllables due the amphimacers at the beginning of the line. This section touches on the nature of poetry and its impact and its rhyme scheme is aabbcc etc.
In the first stanza Auden immediately begins throwing words at his readers which imply decay and death such as, ?disappeared? and ?dead of winter?. The natural surroundings reflect Yeats death as the ?brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,/And snow disfigured the public statues?. Auden uses personification and alliteration in his description stating that ?The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day?. The last two lines contain alliteration and are repeated again at the end of this section: ?What instruments we have agree/ The day of his death was a dark cold day?. Auden again describes nature in his second stanza, except this time he is portraying how nature pays no attention to Yeats? death. ?The wolves ran on?? despite his death and ?The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays.? Auden utilizes pathetic fallacy in that last line giving emotions to the river. The final line, ?The death of the poet was kept from his poems?, also illustrates how life keeps going on after Yeats dies.
During the third stanza Auden focuses more on the actual passing of Yeats. He uses geographical diction to describe his Yeats? death: ?The provinces of his body..?, ?The squares of his mind??, and ?Silence invaded the suburbs?. Auden also personified silence in that last line. Auden employs alliteration as well, ?The current of his feeling failed?. Yeats ?became his admirers?, living on in their memory. The fourth section discusses what will become of Yeats. His works are ?scattered among a hundred cities?. He finds ?his happiness in another kind of wood?, a bookcase as opposed to the forest. Yeats survives ?in the guts of the living?. The last stanza pays attention to the future making an allusion to the ?Bourse?, the French stock exchange, and juxtaposing that with ?the poor?. However they will all go about their daily lives ?each in the cell of himself?. The significance of his poetry will become mitigated because only ?a few thousand will think of this day?The day of his death?? Auden repeats the last two lines from the first stanza, which alters the number of lines from six to eight.
second section comments on what Yeats had to deal with during his lifetime, and how his ?gift survived it all?. Auden gives us examples of what he overcame, ?The parish of rich women, physical decay,/Yourself?. Auden suggests that the conflict between Ireland and England ?hurt [Yeats] into poetry?. Employing inverted syntax Auden states that ?Ireland has her madness and her weather still? because Yeats? poetry did not affect it. Poetry ?survives? because it is an art form and it can stand alone with its integrity. It ?flows?From ranches of isolation? , a clich? that we are all isolated from each other, and from ?busy griefs? which are our everyday burdens. The rhyme has shifted from nonexistent in the first section, to near rhyme in this section, and perfects itself to end rhyme in the last section.
 
final section comments on the nature of poetry and begins with the death of Yeats. Using personification and apostrophe Auden makes a request, ?Earth, receive an honoured guest?, which refers to the physical body of Yeats. Auden also personifies time mentioning that it is ?intolerant of the brave and innocent,/ And indifferent?To a beautiful physique?. This is the universal truth that the average person is forgotten in time. However on the other hand time will ?worship language? because words can never die. It ?forgives/Everyone by whom it lives?. Auden is stating that time will ?forgive? an author if they write words that are great.
In the fifth stanza of this section Auden shifts his focus to the present time and the events taking place around him. He is writing this poem during the dawn of World War II and illustrating how ?All the dogs of Europe bark,/ And the living nations wait,/ Each sequestered in its hate?. Auden comments on the stupidity of war claiming that ?Intellectual disgrace,/ Stares from every human face?. Next Auden instructs the poet in an apostrophe to ?follow right? and ?with your unconstraining voice,/Still persuade us to rejoice?. Alluding to the biblical story of creation Auden entreats poets to, ?Make a vineyard of the curse [and]?let the healing fountains start?. In Auden?s last two lines he juxtaposes ?prison? and ?free? petitioning the poet to ?Teach the free man how to praise?. That last line sums up the poem to make an excellent epitaph for William Butler Yeats.
Auden breaks down his poem into three sections, each addressing different topics, but all conecting back to Yeats. These sections can also be look upon as stages in Yeats life. The first section represents his early years as a poet emphasized by the lack of meter and rhyme. Both of which also contribute to the sobering mood of Yeats? death. The second section acts as a transition in the poem and can also stand for a transition in Yeats? life which perhaps he accomplished by overcoming the obstacles described. The last section of Auden?s poem is written with flowing rhyme scheme and meter and suggests a time in Yeats life where he reached the pinnacle of his art. This is also the section where Auden described the benefit of words not only to the author, but to society as well and shows the triumphant end to Yeats? life.

Critical Analysis :-

The poem In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden is divided into three sections of varying lengths which form separate poetic units within the poem. The relationship among these units is not very close and organic, as each section is based on somewhat independent strains of thought.

The poem, as its title indicates, is an elegy written to mourn the death of W.B. Yeats, but it is different from the conventional elegy. Traditionally, in an elegy all nature is represented as mourning the death, here nature is represented as going on its course indifferent and unaffected. The great poet’s death goes unnoticed both by man and nature: human life goes on as usual, and so does nature. Secondly, in the traditional elegy the dead is glorified and his death is said to be a great loss for mankind at large. But Auden does not glorify Yeats. He goes to the extent of calling him ‘silly’ and further that his poetry could make nothing happen. “Ireland has her madness and her weather still.” Thus, Auden reverses the traditional elegiac values and treats them ironically. Although, apparently the poem is an elegy, Auden reverses and departs from the known traditions of elegy. He does not idealize Yeats as a poet or sentimentalize his fate. He proceeds to embody certain general reflections on the art of a poet and the place of poetry in the flux of events, which constitute human history. So the death of Yeats remains at the focus of the poem only to support the peripheral reflections in the poem. Section I of the poem describes, in the dramatic setting, the death of Yeats. Yeats died on a day when it was bitter cold, brooks were frozen and airports were deserted. Auden looks upon the death of Yeats as an ordinary occurrence. His death did not affect the order of things. And here Auden introduces an idea which is central to the theme of the poem; a poet’s work ultimately becomes independent of him because he had no control over the interpretation which posterity will give it. He becomes what his readers make him. Section II introduces another strand of thought. Here, Auden’s expression becomes changed with psychological overtones. From the description of the mere physical death of Yeats, Auden proceeds to examine the psychological implications of the work of a poet and assesses the worth of poetry in terms of modern psychology. Despite the great poetry of Yeats, Ireland had remained the same. Poetry fails to produce any revolutions or to make changes in society. What lives after a poet in his style; his manner of saying rather than the subject or the content of his poetry. And this style, manner and language of the poet come to dwell in the subliminal depth of the human psyche, ‘where executives would never want to temper’ it. The uniqueness of poetry lies in the manner in which it objectifies the human condition. In section-III, the poet universalizes the tragedy of Yeats by relating it to the wider theme of the artist in society. Time, which is indifferent to the faults of character or physical charm ‘worships language’. Time does not care for what the poet said but for something about the way he said it. The language of a poet redeems his views and oddity of character. The second half of section- III deals with the imminence of world war-II. The time of Yeats’ death was a terrible one. “It was a time of ‘intellectual disgrace’ sans pity and compassion. Auden begins this ode with an archetypal image cluster that links winter and death. The setting is desolate and filled with winter, death and negative words, which often are linked by alliteration of d sounds. Alliterating negative words and phrase include: ‘disappeared’ and ‘dad’ (line1), ‘deserted’ (line 2), ‘disfigured’ (line3), ‘dying day’ (line 4), and ‘day’, ‘death’ (line 6). This repetition creates a powerful scene of desolation in which the world’s deadliest time seems to mirror the poet Yeats’ death. In an extended form of personification, the wintering earth itself seems to mourn the loss of the poet. In addition, Auden makes good use of other extended metaphors by establishing a different central metaphor for almost each stanza in part 1. He compares death to an invading army that takes over Yeats’ whole being in stanza 4. The ‘invasion’ is preceded by ‘rumors then ‘revolt’ in the provinces of his body; then the ‘squares of his mind’ are emptied, silence pervades the ‘suburbs’ of his existence, and the lights go out when the ‘current of his feeling failed.’ Auden uses a cluster of geographic terms (provinces, squares and suburbs) to illustrate the personal world of Yeats being shut down. These linked geographical comparisons metaphorically make Yeats a whole country into himself, which magnifies the gravity of the loss. Auden also uses individual metaphors with great cleverness. One example is his use of ‘mouth’ at the end of part 2 to talk about poetry and the poet simultaneously. Poetry is a ‘mouth’ in that it metaphorically speaks to the reader. Since the ‘mouth’ is also the organ of speech, the word is used as a form of metonymy to refer to the poet himself. Like a mouth, poetry is an open potential from which words can issue. Mouths, like poems, are eternal features of humankind – one, the mouth, is a permanent physical feature, while the other, the poem, is an imaginative creation that endures beyond the poet’s death. Auden shows considerable ingenuity in employing blank verse, iambic lines of unequal length, half rhymes and feminine endings. The seven syllable lines of the last section seem by contrast to move formally, like a funeral march, with a balance in each line between two major and two minor stresses the rise and fall of the slow-marching soldiers (feat): and with formal movement, the grand last section makes a formal statement. The form of odd is traditionally reserved for important and serious subjects and is written in an elevated style, so Auden gave Yeats great value and dignity by using the genre.

word :- 3091

                               Works Cited

1.              Baldwin, Emma. "In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W. H. Auden". <em>Poem Analysis</em>, <a id="site_link" href="https://poemanalysis.com/w-h-auden/in-memory-of-wb-yeats/"> https://poemanalysis.com/w-h-auden/in-memory-of-wb-yeats/</a>. Accessed 5 June 2021.

2.              Osborne, Kristen. Kissel, Adam ed. "W. H. Auden: Poems “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” Summary and Analysis". GradeSaver, 9 March 2014 Web. 13 June 2021.

3.              Sharma, Kedar N. "In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden: Critical Analysis." BachelorandMaster, 19 Nov. 2013, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/in-memory-of-yeats.html.

Written Assignment: 20 Cen Lit - 1

 1. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ represents ‘a vision of dissolution and spiritual draught’. Do you agree? Justify your answer ? 

 Ans :-

               Thomas Stearns Eliot, one of the greatest modern English poets, has tried his best to mark his time by expressing the inherent dangers of modern civilization in his writings. He was conscious of the disordered and fragmented social condition of his time – a time of political instability, anarchy and chaos. In his exclusive poem “The Waste Land” he depicts an appalling vision of chaotic times and disturbed lives. The poem portrays a society that has been left barren – morally, spiritually, intellectually and sexually – by the First World War. The poem is an exclusive example of disappointment and spiritual vacuity of the modern civilization especially after the world entangled into a devastating war that resulted in millions of deaths. All through the poem Eliot depicts the modern waste land that represents the social anarchy and spiritual emptiness of troubled modern life which drives the individual to go deep into emotional crisis and intellectual despair. The paper intends to examine how Eliot’s “The Waste Land” explores the spiritual barrenness and physical deformities of the distressed modern people.

At once a classicist, a critic, a poet, a playwright, a mystic and a philosopher, Thomas Stearns Eliot was a myriad minded man who enjoyed a long life span of more than 75 years and whose literary contribution extended over a period of almost 55 years. With his creative spirit he tried his hand in diverse literary genres – poetry, plays, essays, literary criticism, and so on, and dominated the literary landscape of the twentieth century. Through his writings, critical essays and experiments in versification, style and diction, he regenerated English poetryand influenced the direction of modern poetry. In his writings, he has tried his best to make his time conscious of itself and expressed the inherent dangers of modern civilization. He was conscious about the social anarchy and the spiritual vacuity of his time and in his writings, he depicted the disaster, agony, horror, spiritual sterility, and alienation of modern people. His celebrated poem, The Waste Land (1922) presents a dark and gloomy picture of human sufferingsin the twentieth century. The poem is a study of a civilization doomed by its own sterility (Coote 26). It refers to the spiritual and intellectual decadence of the contemporary world. The poem is an important landmark in the history of English literature and exposes the disillusionment caused by the First World War. To cite Harold Bloom, The Waste Land can be read as “a testament to the disillusionment of a generation, an exposition of the manifest despair and spiritual bankruptcy of the years after World War I” (40). Based on the legend of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle, the poem portrays London as a barren waste land. The poem is built round the symbols of drought and flood which represent death and re-birth respectively, and this fundamental idea is referred to the poem.

Eliot is one of those twentieth century writers who witnessed the socio-political turmoil and transformation of the post-war England. The war had destroyed all that were traditionally good. The most dangerous effect was the loss of spirituality. People became disillusioned by the futility and impotence of the catastrophic war. The war had left many people in a state of destruction and disappointment. Millions of women lost their husbands, children lost their parents, and a sense of abandonment and loss encompassed the nation. “Europe slumped into a monumental melancholy . . . the utopian social dreams evoked by wartime rhetoric were brutally erased by inflation, unemployment and widespread deprivation, not to mention an influenza epidemic that ravaged the world in 1918-1919 and killed more people than the war itself” (Ekstein 235). It is in this aftermath of the First World War that Eliot appears with his poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land. The poem had a significant influence on his contemporaries and is regarded one of the most important documents of its time.

The poem portrays a debilitated world, a world that has declined or disregarded the spiritual life. In the poem, Eliot depicts the excruciating burden of modern city life, its lack of objective and direction, its lack of beliefs and values, reflecting the breakdown of values, total disarray and near collapse of the European civilization in the early 1920s. Many persons viewed the poem as an allegation against the post-war European civilization and as an articulation of disillusionment with the existing society that Eliot viewed as spiritually barren.

The Waste Land was written at the time when the First World War had just ended placing the world in an age of depression, loss, and ultimately death looming over everyone (Ahmed 160). The poem centers round Eliot’s reading of two contemporary influential texts – Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) and Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). Both of Weston and Frazer discussed the myth of the Fisher King in their books. Weston’s book appeared at the very time when Eliot was seeking a coherent shape for the mass of intricate material that enters into his poem (Southam 127). Eliot makes particular use of Weston’s account of the Fisher King, a figure which recurs in a number of fertility myths, and whose story is one of obvious relevance to this poem (127). According to the legends, the land has been blighted by a curse. The crops do not grow, and the animals cannot reproduce. The trouble of the land is caused by the plight of the king of the land, the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals (Brooks 128-129). The injury affects the king’s fertility, and his impotence is the cause of his country becoming a dried out ‘waste land’. The curse can only be lifted by the arrival of a knight who must complete several rituals, “not by pursuing advantages for himself, but by giving himself to the quest of seeking the health and salvation of the land” . Eliot picks up the legend of the Fisher King and his wasteland to describe the existing barren state of modern civilization. Eliot says he drew heavily on this legend for his poem, and critics have found that many of the poem’s allusions refer to this idea.

The title of the poem consists of the central waste land symbol and refers to the intellectual and spiritual barrenness of the modern civilization. It conveys the idea of emotional and spiritual sterility and barrenness of the world that Eliot saw after the First World War. “The ‘waste’ is not, however, that of war’s devastation and bloodshed, but the emotional and spiritual sterility of Western man, the waste of [the modern] civilization” (Southam 126). The title evokes the pictureof a waste land devastated by drought and famine which leads to large-scale starvation, predicament and death. Through the waste land symbol, Eliot shows that the twentieth century civilization is just an infertile, arid world with no genuine retrieving characteristics. The land is barren, and therefore, unable to let anything grow. This barrenness signifies the intellectual and spiritual decadence that has occurred in the contemporary world, where no new hope of faith can develop. Eliot relates the waste land symbol to the ‘Unreal City’ such as London, the “arid plain”(l. 424)*, where the readers get a sense of the “mountains of rock without water” (l. 334) and “the dry stone no sound of water” (l. 24). They see “a heap of broken images” (l. 22) made up of dirtyroads, dead trees, desert rocks, dry bones, rats scurrying in sewers, empty cisterns, and exhausted wells. Thus, the waste land pertains to the contemporary scenario of anguish and waste following the bloodshed of World War I.

The Waste Land is divided into five sections, each with a title like ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’ and ‘What the Thunder Said’. The poem is preceded by an epigraph which comes from the Satyricon, a satire of the poet Petronius (27 BC - 66 AD). The satire implies the endless world-weariness, blindness and absence of redeeming joy which characterizes The Waste Land (Coote 30). In English translation, the epigraph means, “For I once saw with my own eyes the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered, ‘I want to die’.” (Eliot 3) In Greek mythology, Sibyls were women endowed with prophetic power, the power to see into the future. The Cumaean Sibyl had been famous both for her prophecy and for her beauty. She was loved by Apollo who offered her immortality. She accepted the offer but forgot to ask for perpetual youth. Hence, as she grew older, both her memory and prophetic power faded. Trapped in the present she was only slightlyaware of her mythical, magical past and quite indifferent to the future. As such, living in anapparently eternal present, her fate anticipated the fates of the inhabitants of The Waste Land(Saunders 35). Her death-wish is related to her wish to throw away the archaic life, just as the walking dead of the modern “Unreal City” have nothing to expect in life but death. Death alone offers escape; death alone promises the end. In this way the epigraph implies the theme of the poem– Life in the modern waste land is a living death or a life in death, like the life of Sibyl. In the story of the Cumaean Sibyl Eliot found an image which both encapsulated the dislocation of present, past and future time which he saw as symptomatic of the cultural plight of modern people (Saunders34-35). The prophecy of Sibyl sets the tone for The Waste Land as a poem that harshlyfocuses on the numbness and absolute barrenness of the post-war European civilization. The Sibyl’s affliction reflects what Eliot perceives as his own–Eliot lives in a society that has degraded and dried up but will not perish, and he is bound to live with memories of its previous glory. Like the Sibyl the modern people have life but not the youthful vigor and productivity.

conclusion:-

Throughout The Waste Land, Eliot holds a mirror to the society and the mirror reflects the predicaments of modern life in a physical, moral, emotional and spiritual waste land where promiscuity, materialism and corruption were widespread and where there was a lack of communication and interaction between individuals. Beginning with the section one entitled ‘The Burial of the Dead’ that portrays a physical wasteland and buried human consciousness, Eliot continues to the section five titled ‘What the Thunder Said’ to find out a probable way out to the problem that afflicted modern life. Throughout the journey up to section five, the readers observe some serious problems of modern life like ignorance, sexual abuse, lust, hypocrisy, futility, the vain purpose of life, and so forth. The poem deals with the whole post War generation referring to the spiritual and intellectual decay of the modern world. The poem portrays a society that has been left barren – morally, spiritually, intellectually and sexually – by the war. Eliot takes the readers into the very heart of the waste land which is post war Europe and makes them realize the plight of a whole generation. That generation is effectively symbolized by the withered Cumaean Sibyl of the epigraph, with her desperate wish to die; by Madame Sosostris, the deceitful fortune-teller who knows nothing of the mysteries of life; by Mrs. Equitone to whom life has lost all variety and distinction; by Mrs. Porter and Sweeney, an old procuress and her crude client; by the lady of situations, a victim of her own nerves and of the hysterical relationship with her lover; by Lil, who looks so antique while she is still thirty-one; by the typist and her seducer going through the sex act in an indifferent, mechanical, routine-like manner; by the demobilized Albert who wants a good time, as do the loitering heirs of city directors; by Mr. Eugenides, the dubious merchant; and so on. All these characters convey the idea of emotional and spiritual barrenness as well as the physical deformities of the world that Eliot saw after the First World War. That world is the Waste Land of the poem’s title: motionless, sexually impotent, and spiritually barren.

word :- 2216

Works Cited

1. Ahmed, Fatima Falih, et al. “Rejuvenation in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land”. European Scientific 
Journal. Vol. 11, No. 35 (2015). Web. 30 April 2018. 
2.Bloom, Harold. T. S. Eliot: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Broomall P.A: Chelsea 
House, 1999. Print. 
3.Brooks, Cleanth. “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth”. T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land. Ed. by 
C. B. Cox and Arnold P. Hinchliffe. London: Macmillan Education Ltd, 1968 (7th reprint 
in 1986). Print. 
4.Garg, Mamta. “Whispers of fallen Women in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land”. New Man 
International Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies. Vol. 1, No. 5, May 2014. Web. 14 
May 2018.
5.Southam, B. C. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. 6th Ed. San Diego, New York, and 
London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. Print.
6.Wheeler, Willy. “Death by Water”. Community & Collaboration - NYU’s Web Publishing. 06 
October 2015. Web. 21 May 2018.

Auden's Poems

 1) Which lines of 'September 1, 1939' you liked the most? Why?

“September 1, 1939,” one of Auden’s most famous and oft-quoted poems, gained new prominence after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Curiously, though, Auden came to dislike this work, finding it “dishonest” and a “forgery.” He had his publisher include a note that the work was “trash he was ashamed to have written”; he also tried to keep it out of later collections of his poems. It is unclear why he felt so embarrassed by the poem. It has remained a staple of Auden’s work as well as an inspiring call to speak out in hope for justice and brotherhood despite times of war or terror.The poem was written in 1939, just as German troops invaded Poland and began the Second World War. It was published in The New Republic that year and included in the collection Another Time the following year. Hitler’s invasion of Poland declared his military strength and flouted the agreement of the Munich Conference, shocking the entire world. The United States did not enter the war until 1941.

Auden begins his poem with the speaker sitting in a dive bar in New York City. Hitler’s actions have brought the “low dishonest decade” to a close, bringing “the unmentionable odour of death” to the September evening. He contemplates Hitler’s psychology using a Jungian concept a “huge imago,” a psychological concept of the idealized self and he imagines that historians will explain how German culture, perhaps starting with Martin Luther’s Protestant shakeup of Christianity hundreds of years earlier, led Germans to go along with Hitler’s psychopathic evil.

Yet, even the average person perceives the basic human patterns in the story: doing evil to someone leads that person to do evil in return. More than 2,000 years ago, Thucydides saw how dictators abuse an apathetic population to accomplish their ends, even in a democracy like Germany . The same pattern keeps occurring. Perhaps this is a reason why Auden’s nine stanzas all have the same pattern of eleven lines that, while they do not rhyme, tend to repeat vowel and consonant sounds at the ends of lines (for example, the last four lines of stanza 1: earth/lives/death/night; stanza 2: know/learn/done/return; stanza 3: away/pain/grief/again). The story told here is not new.

In the fourth stanza the poet focuses on New York City, a paragon of modern capitalism, which has yielded “blind skyscrapers” that “proclaim / the strength of Collective Man” via competition and diversity rather than coordinated socialistic efforts. Yet, one cost of this social blindness is isolationism. People cling to their average lives; they are content to pursue their happy dreams, and they keep the music playing and the lights on so that they never see how morally lost they are. They trust “Authority” , which fits their selfish and sensual desires to fulfill their goals regardless of what is happening in Europe.

What is missing is awareness of this basic human jealousy that privileges oneself over others, leading not only to evil but also complacency and apathy when evil is happening elsewhere, as in Europe. Meanwhile, politicians inevitably take advantage of these tendencies as the geopolitical “game” plays out.

In the last two stanzas the poetic voice tries to overcome the problems identified in the previous stanza: “Who can reach the deaf, / Who can speak for the dumb?” Auden scholar James Persoon notes that the speaker only has one voice with which to “undo the folded lie” that humans are too jealous to seek justice.

Yet, the speaker is one of many people who provide “points of light” like this poem. In contrast to the points of light that come from a firing gun, the poem’s rhetorical points “flash out” as a message exchanged with other members of “the Just,” those who seek justice. Although each person writes selfishly and separately, “dotted everywhere,” poems about solidarity and justice create a kind of solidarity. In this way, the network of poems “ironically” emerges spontaneously, mirroring the network of New York skyscrapers which emerge without coordination and make the city.

The poet knows he is just like everyone else, “composed like them / Of Eros [alluding to the god of love, representing the passions] and dust [alluding to Biblical passages about human mortality and returning to the natural dust of the earth upon death].” It is a time of “negation and despair” for anyone who is paying attention to Europe. Nonetheless, the speaker hopes his words can show “an affirming flame” of human connectedness and concern.

If Auden’s speaker is speaking against apathetic neutrality in the face of German aggression, is he calling for the United States to go to war? Or is the role of such a poet to affirm common humanity and justice along with the others who are “Just,” taking a prophetic route while hoping that people will turn from their selfish ways? When Auden changed the key line from the idealistic “We must love one another or die” to “We must love one another and die,” the meaning seems to have changed to express that going to war in the name of love was, in the case of the Second World War, perhaps in hindsight, justified.

2) What is so special about 'In Memory of W B Yeats'?

William Butler Yeats died in winter: the brooks were frozen, airports were all but empty, and statues were covered in snow. The thermometer and other instruments told us the day he died “was a dark cold day.”

While nature followed its course elsewhere, mourners kept his poems alive without letting the poet’s death interfere. Yet, for Yeats himself, mind and body failed, leaving no one to appreciate his life but his admirers. He lives through his poetry, scattered among cities and unfamiliar readers and critics, who modify his life and poetry through their own understandings. While the rest of civilization moves on, “a few thousand” will remember the day of his death as special.

In the second section of the poem, Yeats is called “silly like us.” It was “Mad Ireland” that caused Yeats the suffering he turned into poetry. Poetry survives and gives voice to survival in a space of isolation.

In the third, final section of the poem, the poet asks the Earth to receive Yeats as “an honoured guest.” The body, “emptied of its poetry,” lies there. Meanwhile, “the dogs of Europe bark” and humans continue their “intellectual disgrace.” But the poet is to “follow right / To the bottom of the night,” despite the dark side of humanity somehow persuading others to rejoice in existence. Despite “human unsuccess,” the poet can sing out through the “curse” and “distress.” Thus one’s poetry is a “healing fountain” that, although life is a “prison,” can “teach the free man how to praise” life anyway.

Along with his piece on the death of Sigmund Freud, Auden's tribute to the poet William Butler Yeats is a most memorable elegy on the death of a public figure. Written in 1940, it commemorates the death of the poet in 1939, a critical year for Auden personally as well as for the world at large. This was the year he moved to New York and the year the world catapulted itself into the Second World War.

Yeats was born in Ireland 1856 and embraced poetry very early in his life. He never abandoned the traditional verse format of English poetry but embraced some of the tenets of modernism, especially the modernism practiced by Ezra Pound. He was politically active, mystical, and often deeply pessimistic, but his work also evinces intense lyrical beauty and fervent exaltation in Nature. He is easily considered one of the most important poets of the 20th century, and Auden recognized it at the time.

The poem is organized into three sections and is a commentary on the nature of a great poet’s art and its role during a time of great calamity as well as the ordinary time of life’s struggles.

The first, mournful section describes the coldness of death, repeating that “The day of his death was a dark cold day.” The environment reflects the coldness of death: rivers are too frozen to run; hardly anyone travels by air; statues of public figures are desecrated by snow. These conditions symbolize the loss of activity and energy in Yeats’ death.

At the same time, far away, wolves run and “the peasant river” flows outside of the rest of civilization , keeping the poetry alive. The implication is that the poems live even though the man may be dead. The difficulty with this situation, however, is that the man can no longer speak for himself; “he became his admirers.” His poems, like ashes, are “scattered” everywhere and are misinterpreted . The ugly fact of bad digestion modifies the poems as “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”

Furthermore, as in “Funeral Blues” and “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the events of the average day go on—a trader yells on the floor, the poor suffer for most people, the day goes unmarked. It takes a special soul to mark the importance of the day of the death of a great poet, and only “a few thousand” have such a soul. As scholar James Persoon writes, “These two elements the poet's death as national and natural crisis and the poet’s death as almost completely insignificant describe a tension within which Auden explores the life of the work after the death of the author.” Thus, in addition to the thermometer telling us so, the speaker of the poem tells us that it is a “dark cold day” with respect to the popular reception of Yeats’ poetry.

In the second section the speaker briefly reflects on the generative power behind Yeats’ poetry. It was “Mad Ireland” that “hurt” him and inspired his poetry as a form of survival. For Yeats, “silly” like other poets or, more broadly, like other Irishmen or humans, poetry was a “gift” that survived everything other than itself even Yeats’ own physical degeneration, the misinterpretations of “rich women,” and Yeats’ own failings. Poetry itself, from this perspective, survives in the midst of everything, not causing anything, but flowing out from isolated safety and providing voice  to that deep level of raw and unassailable humanity.

The third and final part brings the reader back into more familiar territory, with six stanzas of AABB verse, every line in seven-syllable trochaic verse.

The body of Yeats  rests in the ground, the warring nations fight, people misinterpret his work (“intellectual disgraces”), yet somehow, his poetry retains a place somewhere. The true poet, like Yeats himself, will “follow right / To the bottom of the night”, to that fundamental human freedom where an “unconstraining voice” can “persuade us to rejoice” in our existence.

True enough, the human “curse” remains; death awaits. This is all too true in a time of war. But the poet can turn the curse into a “vineyard” where sweet poetic drink can form. On the one hand there are “deserts of the heart” and human distress, yet on the other hand, with this wine a “healing fountain” can release a man from “the prison of his [mortal] days.” A poet like Yeats, despite everything, can “teach the free man how to praise” that fundamental spark of existence that survives in one’s poetry.

3) Is there any contemporary relevance of 'Epitaph on a Tyrant'?

‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ is one of Auden’s short masterpieces. In just six lines, W. H. Auden (1907-73) manages to say so much about the nature of tyranny. You can read ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ here, before proceeding to our short analysis of this powerful poem that remains all too relevant today.

Wyston Hughes Auden, or WH Auden, was a British poet, often considered by critics to be one of the best England has ever produced. Auden’s work is known, not only for its remarkable poetic calibre and craftsmanship but also for his skilful portrayal of myriad themes- ranging from the political, social, ethical, to the moral and even the individual. One of Auden’s best known poems and written, interestingly when Adolf Hitler was at the peak of his power in Europe, is a short, six line piece entitled- “Epitaph on a Tyrant” The poem talks about a man- an anonymous “he”- a perfectionist whose poetry was understandable and who, himself, understood “human folly” and the human psyche like “the back of his hand”. He was most interested in “armies and fleets” and when he laughed “respectable senators” burst out in cackles of laughter. Then in a sudden drastic change of atmosphere, Auden says- “When he cried, little children died in the streets”.

One of the significant factors that lends Auden’s poetry a rare kind of brilliance is its ability to appeal to the reader in different sorts of ways. Therefore, there are various different interpretations of this one short poem- the most obvious one being that of an allusion to Adolf Hitler- the Fuhrer of Germany, which rings true on almost every count. Hitler was a man yearning to establish a Pan German empire- a perfect pure Aryan race, he was man whose “poetry”- whose thoughts, beliefs, charisma, all reflected in his oratory which was considered brilliant and inspired millions to support him.

W B Yeats - Poems

W B Yeats :- 

Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Irish Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also, a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats , she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.

Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in London, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright, and as one of the very greatest poets in any language of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of seventy-three.

Video recording of online class  :-

'The Second Coming as a Pandemic Poem' :-

‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), written in 1915 and published the following year. It’s one of Yeats’s shortest well-known poems, comprising just six lines, and sets out why Yeats chooses not to write a ‘war poem’ for publication. Before we analyze ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’, here’s a reminder of the text of the poem.

‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem about refusing to write a war poem when asked to produce one. This odd act of refusal-as-assent writing a poem, but a poem which takes a stand against writing a certain kind of poem has the air of irony about it, and Yeats probably intended his poem to be taken as a brief ‘thanks, but no thanks.

In terms of its form, the poem is written in iambic pentameter, rhymed ABC ABC. The final two lines are the only ones which might cause some real head-scratching from readers enjoyed: young girls might enjoy his romantic verses about old Ireland, while an old man might enjoy the ballads.

It was the American novelists, Henry James, and Edith Wharton – who were good friends and who both came to live in Britain – who approached him: Wharton was editing an anthology, The Book of the Homeless, the profits from which would go towards helping refugees of the war. That anthology appeared in 1916, complete with Yeats’s contribution, which appeared under the alternative title ‘A Reason for Keeping Silent’.

Yeats had written to his friend Lady Gregory: ‘I suppose, like most wars it is at root a bagman’s war, a sacrifice of the best for the worst. I feel strangely enough most for the young Germans who are now being killed.’ Yeats goes on to say that the ‘bespectacled’ Germans he has seen remind him more of himself than the English soldiersor the French troops.

In a letter of the same year, sent to John Quinn, Yeats wrote that the First World War was ‘merely the most expensive outbreak of insolence and stupidity the world has ever seen and I give it as little thought as I can.’ These remarks leave us in little doubt about how Yeats viewed the conflict, and help to explain why he wrote ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’.

‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ could be productively analysed alongside ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, for this reason. Yeats objected to the war, and could not imagine using poetry to wave the flag for the right ‘side’. His line ‘We have no gift to set a statesman right’ is a forerunner to Auden’s famous line that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, and the similarity is no coincidence: Auden makes that well-known statement in his elegy for W. B. Yeats, written in 1939.

'On Being Asked for a War Poem :-

Today’s post returns to the issue we touched on last month with “Acting.” What is an artist’s proper role regarding politics and social issues? And why do artists who engage in politics draw especial condemnation for doing so?

This may be the wrong question. Does anyone ask, what’s the proper role of a lawyer, real estate tycoon, school teacher, doctor or fry cook in politics? None that I’ve heard of lately. My working answer to this possibly disingenuous question is going to be long, so if you can, bear with me.

Probably the only other profession that has its participation in politics questioned in any way would be clergy, and I think there are a pair of oddly similar issues with artists and clergy speaking on politics.

Artists, at least good ones, by their nature tend to be “progressives.” Please, if you can, skip by any associated political stances you attach to that label, it’s honestly the best word I could come up with. By “progressives,” I mean that artists naturally seek change, novelty, and the advancement of new ideas even if they are built on older ones. Scientists and technologists have a similar bent, but artists like to think of themselves as ahead of even the sciences in this regard. Religious leaders, teachers, preachers, tend to be “conservative.” Please apply the same caution to that word as I asked for “progressives.” By conservative, I mean that they see the values in cultural traditions as possibly being given by supernatural forces that are of a higher order than mere human thought, or at the very least, that traditions are time-tested in such a way that they need to be honored, and to extent that seems reasonable to them, for those traditions to remain unchanged.

Are there “conservative” artists. Yes, they are. It’s quite possible to be artistically progressive (important for good artistic work) and politically conservative. Shakespeare presents himself as conservative politically, but was a culture changing artist. And it’s easy for me to think of some 20th century artists who are not “conservative” but “reactionary,” Ezra Pound for one. Caution again, just a label, let me explain: I use reactionary as a label here to denote people who believe that some important elements have failed to have been conserved, and that change is necessary to return to that state or set of values that no longer effectively exist.

Are there religious “progressives.” Yes indeed. Remember that religious people overwhelmingly believe that certain values are given by superhuman forces, ones that exceed what humans themselves might honor. There has always been a large part of religious thought that says that mankind is “fallen” and so therefore is in constant need for change toward the good, a good that might never be properly illuminated by fallen human thought.

So for both our “conservative” label (clergy) and “progressive” label (artists) we’re talking associated tendencies, not absolute dictates. Humans are complicated after all; but I think that’s one thing that strangely joins concerns about artists and clergy in the political arena. Opponents to conservative clergy and progressive artists see these groups as respectively prejudiced, temperamentally oriented toward resistance to necessary change or moving toward too broad and untested change. In this outlook, their self-selected temperaments that lead to their professions blind them, and so they aren’t viewing things fairly or deeply enough because of who they are. One proof we can see in this is that it’s rare for conservatives to criticize conservative artists in politics, or for progressives to criticize religious leaders who champion progressive causes. The belief here would be that those who go against natural tendencies in their professions must be significantly immune to that issue of characteristic prejudice.

You might next think or ask: well doesn’t a fry cook or a real-estate tycoon have their own prejudices based on their livelihoods? What’s different about artists or clergy?

My answer to that moves to another thing those two professions have in common: they are both pretty much in the same business. When a religious leader gives a spell-binding sermon, or a writer moves us to tears, when a religious visionary tells us what the angels said to them, or the musician brings sounds together in a way that moves us, when the crowd rises as one, with one hosanna on their lips, does it matter here who is at the front of the house?

What is important to our question comes after these remarkably similar experiences. Are we in that crowd, and yet not moved to rise in praise like the others? Is there often a let-down, however vague and hard to explain afterward? A way in which we feel unworthy, a way in which we feel we thought we were changed and yet we are not changed? Do we ever feel tricked: fearing, or perhaps even knowing, that the artist or preacher has engineered this with the techniques of their craft, techniques that might work regardless of the content they convey

Now what if the person at the front of the room is not an artist or a preacher, but a political figure

So all this is a prelude to a very short, yet puzzling piece, with words by William Butler Yeats: “On Being Asked for a War Poem.”

Bob Dylan and Robert Frost

1.)  Which song of Bob Dylan has made an impact on you? Why? Can you find a song similar to the same theme in other language?

 Bob Dylan:-

Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. He grew up in the city of Hibbing. As a teenager, he played in various bands and with time his interest in music deepened, with a particular passion for American folk music and blues. One of his idols was the folk singer Woody Guthrie. He was also influenced by the early authors of the Beat Generation, as well as by modernist poets.

Dylan moved to New York City in 1961 and began to perform in clubs and cafés in Greenwich Village. He met the record producer John Hammond, with whom he signed a contract for his debut album, Bob Dylan (1962). In the following years, he recorded a number of albums which have had a tremendous impact on popular music: Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, Blonde On Blonde in 1966 and Blood On The Tracks in 1975. His productivity continued in the following decades, resulting in masterpieces like Oh Mercy (1989), Time Out of Mind (1997) and Modern Times (2006).

Dylan’s tours in 1965 and 1966 attracted a lot of attention. For a period, he was accompanied by film maker D. A. Pennebaker, who documented life around the stage in what would come to be the movie Dont Look Back (1967). Dylan has recorded a large number of albums revolving around topics such as: the social conditions of man, religion, politics and love. The lyrics have continuously been published in new editions starting in 1973, under the title WritingsandDrawings, subsequently changed to Lyrics. As an artist, he is strikingly versatile; he has been active as a painter, actor and scriptwriter.

Besides his large production of albums, Dylan has published experimental work like the prose poetry collection Tarantula (1971). He has written an autobiography, Chronicles (2004), which depicts memories from the early years in New York and which provides glimpses of his life at the center of popular culture. Since the late 1980s, Bob Dylan has toured consistently, playing over 3000 concerts during the last 20 years. Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary culture is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of literary and musical analysis.

"Blowin' in the Wind" :-

Dylan claimed he wrote the lyrics of "Blowin' in the Wind" in 10 minutes in a NYC cafe, and they've gone on to inspire poets and activists for decades. Its lyrics are a series of questions with no answers. They allow for multiple interpretations, making the song, as Rolling Stone wrote in their "500 Greatest Songs of All Time," an "all-purpose progressive anthem suggesting that things must and will change." Because of this, it served as the center of several protest movements in the '60s.

Dylan released his version in 1963 on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan right as the civil rights movement was reaching its peak. He performed the song at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. Peter, Paul and Mary, who recorded a popular version that same year, performed it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial just hours before Martin Luther King told the world, "I have a dream."

Later, due to the song's "cannonballs" and "doves," it lent itself to anti-Vietnam protests. According to activist and musician Peter Yarrow, the all-purpose applications of the song are a major part of its appeal. "You can hear in this a yearning and a hope and a possibility and a sadness and sometimes a triumphal proclamation of determination," he told NPR. "So it's a matter of interpretation and, frankly, I think Bobby was probably right and legitimate in not giving a specific interpretation."

 yes I find a song similar to the same theme in other languages " Tera Hone Laga Hoon"

2.)  Which poem of Robert Frost has made an impact on you? Why? 

Robert Frost was born on March 26th, 1874. One of the most celebrated poets in America, Robert Frost was an author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes and a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony. Robert Frost's work was highly associated with rural life in New England. The poet often uses the New England setting to explore complicated philosophical and social themes. As a well-known and often-quoted poet, Robert Frost was highly honored during his presence on earth, receiving 4 Pulitzer Prizes.

Robert Frost's father was a former teacher who later turned newspaperman. His father was also known to be a gambler, a hard drinker, and a harsh disciplinarian. For as long as he allowed, he had a passion for politics. Robert Frost resided in California until the age of eleven. Frost moved with his mother and sister to eastern Massachusetts, after the death of his father.

Frost's mother later joined the Swedenborgian church and had the poet baptized in it. As an adult, Frost left the faith of his mother. As a city boy, Frost grew up understanding so many things in life and had his first poem published in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In 1892, he attended Dartmouth College for just less than a semester. While at Dartmouth College, Frost joined the fraternity called Theta Delta Chi. Frost went back to his hometown to work and teach at various jobs including newspaper delivery and factory assignment. Robert Frost sold his first poem titled My Butterfly in 1894 to The Independent at the rate of 15 dollars.

Frost was proud of the success the poem brought to him and went on to ask Elinor Miriam White's hands in marriage. Both Elinor and Frost had graduated co-valedictorians from their high-school and remained in contact with one another. However, Elinor Miriam White refused the notion to marry Frost, mentioning that her education was important first. Robert Frost felt another man was occupying his position in White's heart and went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. He came back in 1895 and asked Elinor White again to marry him. The same year, both of them became happily married.

The couple taught school together until the year 1897. Robert Frost later entered Harvard University for 2 years. His records were good, but he decided to go back home because Elinor is expecting her second child. Frost's grandfather bought a farmer in Derry, New Hampshire for the young couple. Frost remained there for a space of 9 years and wrote so many of the poems that will make up his first works. While attempting to pick up the poultry farming business, the whole thing went unsuccessful. Frost was forced to settle for another at Pinkerton Academy, a secondary school.

Roberts Frost went to Glasgow with his family in 1912 and later lived in Beaconsfield. In the next year, Frost published his first book titled A Boy's Will. In England, Robert Frost made important contacts including T. E. Hulme, Edward Thomas, and Ezra Pound. The mentioned names were the first Americans to write a favorable review of Robert Frost's work. Some of the first pieces of his poet work were written while living in England. In 1915, Robert Lee returned to America and purchased a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. That same year, Frost launched a career of writing, lecturing and teaching.

Frost became an English professor at Amherst College from 1916-1938. While a professor at Amherst College, he advised his writing students to always bring the notion of the human voices to their craft. From 1921 and the next forty-two years of his life, he had three great expectations. During summers, Frost spent time teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont. Nevertheless, Middlebury College still owns and managed Frost's farm. Middlebury College as managed his farm as a National Historic Site located near the Bread Loaf campus. He also represented the United States of America on several official missions. On January 20th, 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, Frost recited a poem titled The Gift Outright.

Over the course of his career, he became popular for poems involving the interplay of voices such as Death of the Hired Man or dramas. To be factual and upfront here, Frost's work was highly well-known among so many people and it remained so. Among Frost's popular shorter poems are Mending Wall, Directive, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Fire and Ice, Birches, After Apple Picking. Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize at 4 different times. This is an achievement unequaled by any other American poet.

Robert Frost finally died in Boston on January 29th, 1963. He was happily buried in the Old Bennington Cemetery, Vermont. Harvard's 1965 alumni archive dictates that Frost had an honorary degree in the university. He also received honorary degrees from Oxford, Bates College, and Cambridge universities. History records that Robert Frost was the first person to receive 2 honorary degrees from Dartmouth College. During his lifetime, the main library of Amherst College and as well as the Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia were named after him.

Since the nineteenth century, American poetry has developed in two main streams; the first began with the free, pulsating, incantatory verse of Walt Whitman, while the second started with the experiment and innovation of Emily Dickinson. Frost owes a little to both traditions, though he has, on the whole, tended to work from and continue an earlier tradition and thus create a tradition of his own. Records have shown that Frost was a farmer, a poet, a rare combination. As a farmer, Frost only spent ten years in the occupation. Frost's works have been perfectly divided into 9 collections or books. There are several great poems found in the list such as Mountain Interval, North of Boston, and New Hampshire. Frost usually displays the life occurring in New England and showcased it via his poems. With the comprehensive explanation of this article, you are sure to discover Robert Frost's life and his achievement in poems. Frost is worth calling a legend after reading through the great work of his hand.