Freedom And Inevitability - Auden's Poem Experiment

The way in which one sees Auden's various experiments with verseforms betrays one's understanding or misunderstanding of his poeticsand even his world view. Behind the light–to the extent of having beenregarded as trivial or frivolous by many critics–forms that Auden usedand experimented is his serious thinking about the problems of life andthe world of which he is a part. In Auden's poetry, technical means arenot only a manifestation of his great virtuosity, but an essential part ofthe overall poetic meaning. Auden's experiments with verse forms spanhis entire career, which began by imitating the personalized forms ofseveral modern poets, followed by Eliotic free verse and many andvarious traditional forms, and, lastly, syllabic verse, which Audenadapted well to his purposes. Always conscious of what he was doing,Auden made each major change in his formal experiments a signal ofhis ever maturing ideology as well as his ever reassuring craftsmanship.My dissertation aims, first of all, at a comprehensive and clearpresentation of Auden's views on the dialectical relationship betweenfreedom and necessity, which, in my opinion, is the core of Auden'sideology and poetics. Some of the material in my presentation has neverbeen used by critics, and the way I see Auden's poetic theory inconnection with his ideas of freedom and necessity is new. Next, Iattempt to map the trajectory of Auden's experiments with verse formsand relate it to his concerns about freedom and necessity. Myclassification of Auden's syllabic verse and my analysis of its metricalproperties are, I hope, more satisfactory than what existent studieshave offered. Besides, I have corrected a few errors made by Audenscholars along the way.Supported chiefly by Auden's own writing and secondarily bycontemporary poetic theory, combining theoretical argumentation withclose reading of poems, and further enriched by plentiful biographical material, I arrive at the conclusion that Auden's experiments with verseforms reveal the depth of his concerns about the relation betweenfreedom and necessity and that the interaction between form andcontent in his poems contributes significantly to conveying hisunderstanding of the complex relation between freedom and necessity.