W. H. Auden's Poetry: Mythos, Theory, and Practice By R. Victoria ...

theoretical provenance in Auden's thoughts on various subjects at that time.

To that end, I have gathered the relevant materials as follows. In chapter 2, “The Quest Perilous,” I explain what Auden's ultimate search was for; when, more or less, he became conscious of and committed to it; and why he regarded it as dangerous. In chapter 3, “Terminus the Mentor,” I survey Auden's prose writings to demonstrate how insistently Auden invoked the notion of limits in thinking about individual talent, poetic growth, language, poetry in general, and the tradition. These concerns are fundamentally inseparable from his thinking about versification and must be produced and explained before we can understand the full significance of Auden's later quest for a limitary poetics and prosody. In chapter 4, I trace the development of Auden's concept of the “Good Drab” style, another key feature of the limitary poetry. In chapter 5, I discuss Auden's ideas concerning diction, per se, which he called “the poetic instrument.” Always strict about word choices and etymology, Auden began vehemently to attribute what he considered the alarming social degradations of the 1960s to the sloppy diction of the media and other public discourses. In chapter 6, I trace the gradual evolution of Auden's limitary metrics and of his experimental stanzaic forms. In chapter 7, I explain the nature of Auden's fully developed limitary poetic structures and provide analyses of representative limitary poems of several types. In chapter 8, I present and discuss Auden's limitary world view and show how his last poems compare thematically to some of his earlier and much more famous ones.