Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources (Studies in Major Literary Authors)

144 Pages·2006·0.81 MB·English

by  Rachel Wetzsteon

Studies in Major
Literary Authors
Edited by
William E. Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College
A Routledge Series
Studies in Major Literary Authors
William E. Cain, General Editor
A Singing Contest Queer Times
Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Christopher Isherwood’s Modernity
Seamus Heaney Jamie M. Carr
Meg Tyler
Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary
Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist Conception”
and Analyst Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels
Reneé Somers Paul J. Ohler
Queer Impressions The End of Learning
Henry James’s Art of Fiction Milton and Education
Elaine Pigeon Thomas Festa
“No Image There and the Gaze Remains” Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads
The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham Scott Rode
Catherine Sona Karagueuzian
Creating Yoknapatawpha
“Somewhat on the Community-System” Readers and Writers in Faulkner’s Fiction
Fourierism in the Works of Owen Robinson
Nathaniel Hawthorne
No Place for Home
Andrew Loman
Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the
Colonialism and the Modernist Novels of Cormac McCarthy
Moment in the Early Novels of Jay Ellis
Jean Rhys
The Machine that Sings
Carol Dell’Amico
Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of
Melville’s Monumental Imagination the Body
Ian S. Maloney Gordon A. Tapper
Writing “Out of All the Camps” Influential Ghosts
J.M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement A Study of Auden’s Sources
Laura Wright Rachel Wetzsteon
Here and Now
The Politics of Social Space in
D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf
Youngjoo Son
“Unnoticed in the Casual Light of Day”
Philip Larkin and the Plain Style
Tijana Stojković
Influential Ghosts
A Study of Auden’s Sources
Rachel Wetzsteon
Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data
Wetzsteon, Rachel.
Influential ghosts : a study of Auden’s sources / Rachel Wetzsteon.
p. cm. ‑‑ (Studies in major literary authors)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97546‑9 (alk. paper) 1. Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh),
1907‑1973‑‑Criticism and interpretation. 2. Hardy, Thomas, 1840‑1928‑‑Influence.
3. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813‑1855‑‑Influence. 4. Allusions in literature. I. Title.
PR6001.U4Z895 2006
811’.52‑‑dc22 2006025490
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at
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and the Routledge Web site at
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Contents
List of Abbreviations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Permissions xi
Introduction: Auden and Allusion xiii
Chapter One
Hawk’s Visions and Revisions: Auden’s Debt to Hardy 1
Chapter Two
Influential Ghosts: Structural Allusion in Auden’s Early Poetry 31
Chapter Three
Burying and Praising: Auden’s Anti-Elegiac Elegies 57
Chapter Four
In Health and in Sickness: Auden and Kierkegaard’s Stormy Marriage 83
Notes 109
Works Cited 119
Index 123
v

List of Abbreviations
EA The English Auden
CP Collected Poems
CPr Collected Prose
J Juvenilia
vii

Acknowledgments
I must begin this study by thanking many influential ghosts of my own.
My dissertation advisors, Edward Mendelson and George Stade, provided
unlimited advice and encouragement along the way, restoring my wit and will
too many times to count. At a later stage, James Coulter, Richard Howard and
John Rosenberg offered thoughtful comments as well.
My interest in Auden—and in poetry generally—would never have
taken root without the wisdom and enthusiasm of Marie Borroff and John
Hollander.
I have profited enormously from the kindness of my colleagues at Wil-
liam Paterson University. I also want to extend my thanks to everyone at the
Unterberg Poetry Center of the Ninety-Second Street Y.
My deep gratitude to Max Novick at Routledge.
Thanks, of course, to my family, especially my mother, Sonja Wetzsteon,
my late father, Ross Wetzsteon, my grandmother, Lotte Frenkel, and my step-
mother, Laura Ross.
“Digit friends and dear them all,” the subject of this book once wrote.
At Columbia, Camille Cauti, Nadia Herman Colburn, David Damrosch,
Sarah Hannah, Melanie Hubbard, Jonathan Levin, Julian Levinson, Lisa Mak-
man, Jill Muller, John David Rhodes, and Catherine Siemann helped keep my
writing on track and my spirits high.
Other friends—Sarah Arvio, Lorna Blake, Robert Clark, Will Cohen,
Mary DiLucia, Sharon Dolin, Jeff Goldstein, Rachel Hadas, Daniel Hall, Amy
Kantrowitz, Phillis Levin, Rika Lesser, Charles McNulty, Tannya Mendelson,
David Mikics, Jacek Niecko, Eva Salzman, Eric Steinhart, Aidan Wasley, and
Christopher Yu—did the same.
This book could never have been written without the guidance and
generosity of all these people.
ix