Andreas Seidl 
Auden’s Memorial for the City 

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies – Literature, grade: 2, 0 (B), University of Regensburg (Faculty for Literature and Cultural Studies), course: Hauptseminar: W.H. Auden, language: English, abstract: The origins of a critical view on the focal points of civilizations may be traced back in history very
far. Perfect examples of ancient critique on urban life may be found in the Old Testament, e.g. the
depiction of the civilizations of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah. The metaphorical content of these
examples seems fairly clear: the reader is confronted with societies that either directly challenge the
authority of God or don’t follow his Commandments and are therefore punished by a divine father
figure, which restores the natural and spiritual order. However, from the beginning, the city motive
may also be seen as well as a means of discourse on mankind’s cultural and social output. But
modern city poetry is of course different from the ancient accounts of God’s wrath, which lead to
catastrophes for one city or the other. Its roots are to be found in the works of major eighteenth
century poets, e.g. William Blake’s London, in which he seems to recognize a new form of disorder
being at work within the city limits. The nineteenth century brought forth poets like Wordsworth,
who carried on to work on the theme but showed a different attitude towards the city. Because of its
ever growing dimension, it was then perceived as a totally new and symbolic phenomenon, which
raised philosophical questions about the state of society and the poet’s role within this complex. The
tone of the responses to these questions was for the most part uncertain and personal. Finally, the
twentieth century gave birth to a new kind of urban literature and poetry, with a symbolic meaning
of the city motive, which was as varied as the ethnical, religious, social and political shades of the
human community it referred to. Nevertheless, two tendencies may be observed within modern
poetry and prose, the first one dealing with the content of the city symbol: “ ‘When the city ceases to
be a symbol of art and order, ’ writes Lewis Mumford, ‘it acts in a negative fashion: it expresses and
helps to make more universal the fact of disintegration.’ “1 The second one is the mode major poets
such as T.S. Eliot in his famous The Waste Land attempt to cope with the reality of the twentieth
century city: a controlling framework of myth, literature and history is employed in order to deal
with the chaotic nature of their theme. Both points are to some extent true particularly for Auden’s
later works. […]

1 Johnston (1984: 246).