Adrift, Adoring, And Alone

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) is universally regarded as one of the greatest poetsafter T. S. Eliot, whose works include poetry, prose, drama, libretto, documentaryscript, and so on, among which poetry enjoys the greatest reputation. In the1930s,Auden made a great hit with the publication of his first poetry collection Poems,which won him popularity among literary critics and common readers. The formsand subjects of Auden’s poetry are diverse, the poetic style unique, while itslanguage obscure and elusive, which draws the attention of numerous literary critics.Auden’s life and poetry have been excessively explored by scholars, nevertheless,his identity as a homosexual has gained far less attention. Prolific as he was, he hadwritten about four hundred poems throughout his life, including seven long ones.The eternal subject, love, is overwhelming in Auden’s poetry. Despite this, his lovepoetry has never been studied at large so far. So here based on the partition ofAuden’s love poetry proposed by the author, the thesis interprets his love poems ofeach phase in the light of homosexuality, taking the development of his emotion intoaccount.Chapter One firstly introduces Auden’s life, poetry, previous studies on him andthe structure of the thesis. Chapter Two presents the theoretical framework of thethesis, that is, theories about the causes of homosexuality and New Historicism. Thisthesis focuses only on the theoretical explanations put forward by psychologists,namely, the Genetic or Hormonal Theory (not fully discussed in the thesis), theFamily Pattern Theory, the Erotic Orientation Theory, and the Negative ConditioningTheory. The latter three theories will be applied in the following chapter to analyzeAuden’s formation of same-sex sexuality together with the analysis of his biography.In addition, the term “Self-fashioning” raised by Stephen Greenblatt who was theadvocator of New Historicism expounds on the process of “Subversion” and“Containment” when constructing one’s personal identity and public persona built ona set of socially acceptable standards. The thesis seeks the embodiments of Auden’s“Self-fashioning” of his personal homosexual identity and his public poet identitywhen homosexuality was not generally accepted by the society yet in his poetry.Chapter Three is the core of the thesis. On the basis of Auden’s emotionaldevelopment, his love poetry is divided by the author herein into three phases: 1927-39,1939-41, and1941-73. In the first phase, Auden kept wandering andseeking love among both male and female lovers, yet was never able to touch uponthe truth of love, which made him “Adrift”; in the second phase, Auden eventuallymet his beloved Chester Kallman, and saw their relation as a vow of marriage,hoping to spend his rest of life with Chester, which showed us an Auden “Adoring”Chester; however, the third phase begins with the break of their love affair in1941,when Auden embarked on his own journey “Alone”. The last chapter restates theAuden “Adrift” when he became a homosexual at the beginning, the Auden who wasentirely “Adoring” Chester, and theAuden “Alone” when losing Chester.Through the profound analysis of Auden’s love poetry, the author found thatsince Auden remained his homosexual inclination during his whole life, his lovepoetry is certainly tinged with a dense layer of homosexuality. After all, the thesisprobes into the truth behind and finds the homosexual elements in them, thusenriches the Auden research home and abroad, and deepens readers’ understandingtowards his homosexuality and relative poems at the same time.