W.H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

W. H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry. By PETER FIRCHOW. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 274 pp. 36 [pounds sterling. ISBN 0-87413-766-7.

This book, the author tells us, has been in the making for 'nearly twenty-five years'. It began as an essay aimed to 'debunk Auden's early poetry' for what Firchow thought to be its 'parlor Marxism'. Although Firchow is never entirely comfortable when discussing Auden's politics in the 1930s, happily, the book has now evolved into a broader, if uneven, study which 'combines intellectual and social history, biography and textual analysis' in order to help 'illuminate poems (or parts of poems) that have hitherto remained imperfectly understood' (p. 12). Firchow also seeks to place his discussion in terms of the 'critical insights of the last two generations of Auden critics' (p. 12)....

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