| Summary: | This work focuses on Wystan Hugh Auden's (1907-1973) early poetry (1927-1938) and analyzes its engagement with places, landscapes and local cultures. The scope is limited to the interwar years, when Auden started to write poetry, entered the literary stage and formed his ethical stances, poetics and a personal voice within one of the most socially arduous and aesthetically innovative periods of recent history. This turns his 1920s and 1930s work into a fertile ground for research, which is evidenced by the large body of extant criticism scrutinizing the technical aspects of Auden's interwar poetry as well as its reflection of the poet's affinity with Marxism and the politically conscious intelligentsia of his generation. While sharing the same historical focus, this dissertation diverges from existing scholarship and traces the character of Auden's imaginative dynamic, which renders an inscription of the physical world into art. Auden was highly emotionally and intellectually responsive to particular places, environmental types, human spatial experience and their embedment in arts. This work examines his engagement with Alston Moor in the Northern Pennines, Iceland and England. In his prose, the former two are constructed as sacred places and asylums for his imaginative and physical escapism. The...
|
|---|
