Class Guilt In Auden's Social Poetry

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The poetry of the thirties had also reacted against the complexity and obscurity of modernist poets and asserted that they had no time to be difficult or experimental. They had lambasted Eliot and other modernists and had championed poets like Owen, Houseman and Edward Thomas. Geoffery Thurley says: Though Auden was a Marxist but his very Marxism was guided by less political and social than personal or moral factors. Thus we find in Auden’s social poetry a variant of the ironical theme class guilt is bested forth by means of irony and a consistent self qualification…” (Thurley 54-64). Auden also cast a shadow on the Movement and Robert Conquest is correct when he says: “Who can escape the large and rational talent? But in his case, it is mainly a matter of technical inference. …show more content…

Auden has made a clear difference between individual and society in the following lines: “The difference between individual and society is no slight, since both are so insignificant, that the latter ceases to appear as a middle God with absolute rights, but rather as equal subjects” (Auden, The Anchor Review 82). Movement’s reactionary mood was also prevalent against the poets of the forties. The poets of the forties gave an isolated expression to their emotion without bothering whether these sentiments would appeal the reading public. Nothing was forbidden with them in subject matter and in syntax. They wrote with uncontrolled energy and Dylan Thomas was criticized by Robert Conquest the spokesman of the Movement. Conquest attacked Thomas and other poets of the time and declared that these poets were encouraged to regard their task simply as one of making an arrangement of image of sex and violence tapped straight from the unconscious. The Movement poets were not interested in a

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