In Oblivion, For Hope And Truth: Forgetting In W.H. Auden's Short Poetry

Universally acclaimed for his verbal dexterity in capturing the naked throb of contemporary experiences, Auden occupies canonical status in the twentieth-century poetry and figures as a patron saint of nearly all modern critical schools. Yet, despite a plethora of books and articles reverently dedicated to"pawing at"and"gossiping over"his poetic corpus, little has been said about the motif of forgetting in his verse, which, both socially and psychically, constitutes an indispensable step on the agenda of regeneration. Therefore, this study is devoted to the somewhat inexplicably neglected subject of oblivion mainly in Auden's short poems, with intermittent references to his longer forays in verse. The act of forgetting, which offers a stage for Auden's idiosyncratically eclectic mastery of psychology, in fact responds to various strata of human psyche that roughly fall into three parts. Consciously willed, the outermost level of oblivion operates in tandem with the moral imperative to forgive, unburdening the future of bygone atrocities for the sake of creative resumption. Then, taking on a personal timbre, forgetting in Auden's poetry demonstrably provides the key to man's subconscious desire for weaning, for the unity of a new independent selfhood. Also, anxiety, which aptly encapsulates the moral being of an entire age, exists in the innermost abyss of human unconscious and bursts into the conscious discourse only through ellipses, or, the verbal equivalent of oblivion. By minutely exploring these three psychological functions of forgetting, I seek to decide the popular dispute of Auden's ethical stance and elucidate how poetry, with its limited spatiality, arrives at a temporal infinity indigenous to human potentials.