Postmodern American poetry and the legacy of Auden

In 1939, W. H. Auden emigrated to the United States, leaving behind his public career as an ideological poet. His first American poem was "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," in which he famously claims: "Poetry makes nothing happen." My history of contemporary American poetry begins with Auden's arrival in New York and with this redefinition of poetry's place in the world. By charting the responses of younger American poets to Auden's presence and to his claims for poetry's public role, I show both Auden's defining influence on an entire generation of poets who started writing during his American career, and how Auden's rejection of his English identity constituted not an apologia but what he saw as a characteristically American rearticulation of poetry's ability to effect change. From Auden, his inheritors learned to write an American poetry that was, as he concludes in the Yeats elegy, "a way of happening."My dissertation revises earlier histories of postwar poetry by placing Auden at its center and offers new readings of three major contemporary poets, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich, each of whom engages Auden's example in important ways. Chapter one examines Auden's first American long poem, "New Year Letter," which outlines his post-emigration ideas on poetry's civic and moral function. Chapter two explores Auden's legacy by looking at the many elegies written for him by American poets, revealing the multiple roles Auden played in the poetic culture. Chapter three reads Merrill's Sandover poem as an elegy for Auden, and as a narrative of poetic influence that literalizes Auden's post-Eliotic model in which poets acknowledge and employ their influences, rather than compete anxiously with them. Chapter four considers Ashbery's dialectical poetics with Auden's, finding in Ashbery's Harvard undergraduate thesis on Auden a template for his later career. The final chapter reads Rich's work in dialogue with Auden's, arguing for his significance in her poetic development. The dissertation concludes with interviews on Auden's role in American poetry with three poets: Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard, and John Ashbery.