Hi Y12,
I'm going to be asking you to undertake some research into the life, work and concerns of the one of your poets, W. H Auden.
As one of the biggest names in 20th Century literature, there will be no shortage of useful websites to help you. But here's a start:
I like this quote, from his editor Edward Mendelson, as a neat explanation of Auden's concerns as a writer:
"Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernist predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who turned away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular. All of this Auden rejected. His continuing subject was the task of the present moment: erotic and political tasks in his early poems, ethical and religious ones later. When Auden looked back into history, it was to seek the causes of his present condition, that he may act better and more effectively in the future. The past his poems envisioned was never a southern classical domain of unreflective elegance, as it was for the modernists, but a past that had always been ruined, a northern industrial landscape marred by the same violence that marred his own."
Thanks for reading,
Mr M
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