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W. H. Auden |
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It is hard to imagine a critical approach that would not be relevant to the richness of Auden's literary legacy. He himself stressed the importance of knowing everything about a writer's life, including the intimate details, and would therefore presumably assent to the application of a BIOGRAPHICAL approach to the study of his own works. It is impossible to come fully to terms with his poetry—especially, but by no means exclusively, his poetry of the 1930s—without locating it in its proper HISTORICAL setting. And, given the concern with public issues in so much of his work in the 1930s and 1940s—and, to a lesser but still very real extent thereafter—a full treatment of his thematic concerns must also involve a heavy reliance upon SOCIOLOGICAL criticism.
The explicitly Christian concern of For The Time Being and much of Auden's subsequent work requires interpretation through the focus of MYTHOLOGICAL criticism, and his lifelong concern with the complexities of human nature—whether in a personal, a political, or a spiritual context, or some combination thereof—necessitates a PSYCHOLOGICAL investigation of his writings. Given his (necessarily oblique) treatment of his sexuality, contemporary critical interest in his work often approaches it through the medium of GENDER studies.
The extremely compressed and frequently obscure early poems and, at the other extreme, the sometimes transparent and seemingly artless late works, raise issues engaged by READER-RESPONSE and even DECONSTRUCTIONIST techniques. And perhaps above all, as one of the supreme craftsmen of twentieth-century verse, Auden has from the beginning been subjected to, and profited from, FORMALIST criticism of his poetry.
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