In Memory of w.b. yeats and The Tradition of Elegy

M.A sem 2 (2023-25) , Department of English M K Bhavnagar University of Bhavnagar, Presentation on the paper No : 107 - The Twentieth Century Literature -From world war 2 to the End of The century

1. Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Date: 6 April 2024
In Memory of W. B.
Yeats' and The
Tradition of Elegy






Sem 2 | Batch 2023-25
Asha Rathod

2. Presented by Asha Rathod
In Memory of W. B.
Yeats' and The
Tradition of Elegy

3. ●Name: Asha Rathod
●Roll No: 03
●Email : [email protected]
●M.A Sem: 2 (2023-25)
●Paper No: 107
●Paper Name: The Twentieth Century Literature: From World War II to the
End of the Century
●Submitted to smt. S. B. Gardi Department of
English, Bhavnagar


Personal Information

4. W.H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden

Born:February 21, 1907, York, Yorkshire, England.
Died:September 29, 1973, Vienna, Austria (aged 66)
★In 1908 Auden’s family moved to Birmingham, where
his father became medical officer and professor in the
university.
★He was educated at The University of Oxford (Christ
Church)
Awards And Honors:National Book Award (1956) •
Bollingen Prize (1953) • Pulitzer Prize (1948)
Notable Works:“For the Time Being” • “Homage to Clio”
• “Letters from Iceland” • “Musée des Beaux Arts” • “On
This Island” • “Paid on Both Sides” • “September 1, 1939” •
“The Age of Anxiety” • “The Ascent of F6” • “The Dance of
Death” • “The Double Man” • “The Rake’s Progress”(Spears)

5. In Memory of W. B. Yeats
❏ Auden’s poem In Memory of W. B.Yeats. It was written in 1939 when William Butler Yeats, the famous
Irish poet and dramatist died. Before we attempt a detailed analysis of the poem let us discuss the
significance of elegy as a poetic genre.

❏When Auden wrote "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" in February 1939, Europe was on the verge of World War
II. War did not actually break out until Germany invaded Poland in September, but the sense of
impending catastrophe is present throughout the poem. The failure of Britain and France to resist
Hitler's claims on Czechoslovakia in 1938 seemed to define the mood of Europe as Auden wrote. In spite
of the sense of expectant foreboding, all the nations seemed paralyzed, incapable of action.

❏An elegy can mourn one specific person, such as Walt Whitman's poem ‘When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom'd’ on the death of Abraham Lincoln, or it can mourn humanity in general, as in Thomas
Gray's ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. In the pastoral elegy, modeled on the ancient Greek
poets Theocritus and Bion, the subject and friends are depicted as shepherds living in a pastoral world in
classical times. Famous pastoral elegies are Milton's ‘Lycidas’, on Edward King; Shelley's ‘Adonais’ on
John Keats and Matthew Arnold's ‘Thyrsis’, on Arthur Hugh Clough. Through elegies poets often take
the opportunity to touch upon many important and deeply-felt concerns of society.

6. “Elegies are poems dedicated to the Death”
An Elegy
What is an Elegy?
❏There is a long history of elegiac poetry, that is, poems written on the occasion of
someone’s death. Poems about death are generally concerned not just with the loss, but
also with what remains after a person dies.
❏Traditionally an elegy includes three stages of loss: the first is an expression of grief; the
second is full of praise for the deceased person; the third contains consolation and
solace. Auden’s poem draws on that traditional form but, makes it clear that while
memory deals with the past, it takes place in the present.

➢Elegy, meditative lyric poem lamenting the death of a
public personage or of a friend or loved one by
extension, any reflective lyric on the broader theme of
human mortality.

7. Thomas
Gray
An Elegy Written
in a Country
Churchyard
01
Walt
Whitman
When Lilacs last
in the Dooryard
and Bloom'D
02
John
Milton
Lycidas
03
P.B.
Shelley
Adonais
04
Matthew
Arnold
Thyrsis
05
Several Elegies and Poets

8. When Lilacs last in the
Dooryard and Bloom'D

An Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard

Thyrsis

Lycidas
Adonais

9. ●An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
❏An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, meditative poem written in iambic pentameter
quatrains by Thomas Gray, published in 1751. A meditation on unused human potential, the
conditions of country life, and mortality. An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is one of
the best-known elegies in the language.

❏The main themes in "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" are the universality of death,
social class and value, and poetry and posterity. The universality of death: Gray's poem
depicts death as a leveling force that brings all people, whether rich or poor, to the same final
fate.

❏In conclusion, the poet, through the speaker, ends the elegy by saying that death is an
inevitable event in this world. Also, he says that man's efforts and his struggles to succeed in
life comes to an end in death. Thus, death conquers man regardless of his successes and or
failures in his endeavors during his life.Thomas Gray is not specifically written about the
death of any individual person. Instead deaths of the common people buried in a rural
churchyard. (McK)

Gray

10. ●When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard and Bloom'D
★"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" mourns for Lincoln in a way that is all
the more profound for seeing the president's death as only a smaller, albeit highly
symbolic, tragedy in the midst of a world of confusion and sadness.

★Whitman's title, 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd', refers to the moment he
learned that President Abraham Lincoln had died, in April 1865. At the time,
Whitman was visiting his mother and brother at his mother's home in New York; he
stepped out the door and observed that the lilacs were blooming.

★When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, And the great star early droop'd in the
western sky in the night, I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning
spring.lilacs hold symbolic meaning related to mourning, remembrance, and the
cyclical nature of life and death. The lilacs represent the passage of time and the
renewal of life, as they bloom annually, even in the wake of death.


Whitman

11. ●Lycidas
➢Lycidas is a pastoral elegy, which we talked about briefly in "In a Nutshell."
These poems have a tradition in which the poet gives the dead person whom
they're mourning a name from the works of Virgil, Theocritus, or other similar
poets.

➢The poem mourns the loss of a virtuous and promising young man about to
embark upon a career as a clergyman. Adopting the conventions of the classical
pastoral elegy (Lycidas was a shepherd in Virgil's Eclogues), Milton muses on
fame, the meaning of existence, and heavenly judgment.

➢Milton's elegy 'Lycidas' is also known as monody which is in the form of a
pastoral elegy written in 1637 to lament the accidental death, by drowning of
Milton's friend Edward King who was a promising young man of great
intelligence. The elegy takes its name from the subject matter, not its
form.(Martz)

Milton

12. ●Adonais
➔Adonais(1821) is the plural of the Hebrew word Adon, which means
"lord" or "master." It was first used as God's title before it was used as
God's name. The plural and capitalized Adonais is used because,
according to beliefs, God is the lord of all humanity and thus is the
"lord of all lords."

➔Percy Shelley's "Adonais" is a poem written to commemorate the
death of John Keats. The poem is a pastoral elegy, a poem of
mourning that relies on nature imagery to honor the dead.
➔Adonis in classical mythology was killed by a boar; Adonais (a variant
of Adonis coined by Shelley) was killed by reviewers. It was in the
tradition of elegy to use proper names taken from classical literature.
Shelley's coinage may have been intended to forestall the
misapprehension that the poem was about Adonis.


P.B. Shelley

13. ●Thyrsis
❖Arnold's theme in "Thyrsis"(1866) is not simply the loss of Arthur Hugh Clough. Rather, the
poem is a lament for many kinds of loss: the lost paradise of Oxford, the loss of Arnold's
youth, his and Clough's lost innocence, and the loss of meaning and direction in the society
and culture of his day.

❖It serves as a tribute to Arnold's close friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who had passed
away. The poem is set in the idyllic English countryside and reflects on themes of friendship,
loss, and the transience of life. Through rich imagery and contemplative language.

❖The poem is a pastoral elegy lamenting Clough as Thyrsis, recalling his 'golden prime' in the
days when he and Arnold wandered through the Oxfordshire countryside, their youthful
rivalry as poets, and Clough's departure for a more troubled world.

❖The poem is a pastoral elegy lamenting Clough as Thyrsis, recalling his 'golden prime in the
days when he and Arnold wandered through the Oxfordshire countryside, their youthful
rivalry as poets, and Clough's departure for a more troubled world.(Brooks)

Arnold

14. ➔The Elegiac Act: Auden's "In Memory of W. B.
Yeats"
► The Poem is Structured in Three Sections and Commentary on the nature of
poet's art and roles during time of life calamity. As well as life time Struggles he
has gone through.

► Why does Auden describe yeats as if he is just disappeared rather than died?


►Auden says that Yeats "disappeared in the dead of winter" because it was
during the wintertime that Yeats died. Yeats died on a cold, dark day, and
his death made that day even colder and darker.(Rosenheim)

15. References

Brooks, Roger L. “The Genesis of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis.’” The Review of English Studies, vol. 14, no. 54, 1963, pp. 172–74.
JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/513508. Accessed 2 Apr. 2024.

Cohen, Joseph. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats: And Wilfred Owen.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 58, no. 4, 1959,
pp. 637–49. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27707360. Accessed 2 Apr. 2024.

Martz, Louis L. “Who Is Lycidas?” Yale French Studies, no. 47, 1972, pp. 170–88. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2929408.
Accessed 2 Apr. 2024.

McK., R. B. The Review of English Studies, vol. 7, no. 25, 1931, pp. 107–08. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/508405. Accessed
2 Apr. 2024.

Rosenheim, Edward W. “The Elegiac Act: Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats.’” College English, vol. 27, no. 5, 1966, pp. 422–25.
JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/373268. Accessed 2 Apr. 2024.

Spears, Monroe K.. "W. H. Auden". Encyclopedia Britannica, 17 Feb. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-H-Auden.
Accessed 2 April 2024.

Ulmer, William A. “‘Adonais’ and the Death of Poetry.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 32, no. 3, 1993, pp. 425–51. JSTOR,
https://doi.org/10.2307/25601022. Accessed 2 Apr. 2024.

16. Thank
You