Paper Details

Name: Dinesh Kumar
Country: India

Year: 2025
Volume: Volume-12, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 14-16
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16355520

No other decade ever witnessed the debate with such passionate convictions over great issues
such as Fascism and Communalism, Liberal democracy and socialism, pacificism and
militarism, moral traditionalism and progressivism, as did the nineteen thirties. The period
opening with the great depression of 1929, and ending with the German invasion of Poland in
1939, which signaled the outbreak of the disastrous World War II, was highly disturbed
witnessing the hunger marches, the mass rallies, the countrywide unemployment, the ruthless
oppressions, protests and wars.
Under such circumstances, it was W.H. Auden with the advent of who on the literary scene,
the depiction of such conditions found their lively picture in his poetry. Unlike Yeats,
Lawrence, Eliot Pound, W.H. Auden never looked back to the past as a period of classical
perfection where life was unified and hierarchy secure, and whenever he looks back in to
history, it is not as nostalgic recapitulation, but for seeking the causes which led to present
condition as says Mendelson: “Everything that was more distinctive about Auden can be
traced back to his absorption in the present.”
Cleanth Brooks himself finds Auden’s poetry revealing “the structure of inclusion, with a
maxim density and firmness and with no grib over simplication.”
Key-words: Anarchy, oppression, unemployment, nostalgia, dehumanization, mechanization,
regimentation.