1. Notes on Drowning: Eliot and Auden
HUM 2213: British and American Literature II
Spring 2013
Dr. Perdigao
January 30-February 1, 2013

3. About Suffering “Prufrock” “Musée des Beaux Arts”
Notion of suffering, human condition
Ideas about civilization, between Yeats, Eliot, Auden, extending beyond Ireland, England, America
Insiders/outsiders
Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a war to end all wars but inevitability of WWII
Idea of politics, aesthetics, western civilization as a whole
Immediacy of experience, impersonality

4. Falling

5. W. H. Auden ( )
Born in York, England; educated at Christ Church, Oxford
Moved to U.S. in 1939, became an American citizen in 1946
“from T. S. Eliot he took a conversational and ironic tone, an acute inspection of cultural decay” (Greenblatt 2421)
Great Depression, Waste Land, draws on Freud and Marx; England as “nation of neurotic invalids, now as the victim of an antiquated economic system” (2421)
Rejection of Yeats’ notion of poetry as transcendent, redemptive, the prophetic role of poetry