Suffering And Salvation

This dissertation is a study of the 20th century important Anglo-American poet of W. H. Auden. By analyzing the theme of suffering and salvation, it tries to explore the religiousness in his poetry. Furthermore, it makes us understanding why Auden searched for salvation in his writing career and finally converted to Christian.There are four chapters in the text. The first chapter revisits the process of Auden’s faith conversion. The first part of this chapter is talking about three different belief stages in his life, they are respectively religious belief in germination stage, rational belief in second stage and Christian belief in the third stage. The next part concludes the reasons of why later Auden regained his religious faith. It clarifies to extrinsic causes and intrinsic causes. The extrinsic causes are the influence of the war, British’s society ect. The intrinsic causes are about his emotional wound and then he accepted Kierkegaard’s thought.The second chapter is analyzing the theme of suffering on later Auden’s poem. It first presents about the suffering. It presents suffering consciousness reflected from poems. And then points out the relationship between suffering and Christianity,The third part is about salvation, it is about poem reflects salvation consciousness. It also talks about the relationship between salvation and Christianity, and thenThe forth chapter is about religious imagery on poem. It first classifies the suffering imagery, including wilderness images and disease images. And the second is about the salvation images, including light, water and air.Finally, it is a summary of this paper. on the one hand, it generalizes Auden’s view of Christian religion, on the other hand, it summary of how religious belief influence on later Auden’s poem.