Consider Auden as a Love Poet

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Auden is not a poet of love in the sense in which Shelley, Keats and Browning are. He has his own views on love and has treatment in his poetry in his own manner. His concept of love and his approach to it have undergone a process of change and he has given various interpretations of love; but love has remained one of the chief pre-occupations with him throughout his poetic career. In his early career, Auden wrote under the influence of Freud and adopted his concept of Eros or self-regarding love which was chiefly physical in its manifestations. Gradually this concept was refined and in his later phase of poetic career, he wrote under the influence of Christianity and adopted the Christian concept of Agape or selfless and universal love. Finally he stressed the need of subordinating human love to the love of God or submission to Logos or divine will thus Auden displayed various forms of love in his different stages of poetic career – physical, spiritual, personal, universal, selfish and selfless. Love, according to Auden, can heal the wounds of humanity and provide light and hope during moral and spiritual crisis. It can offer a shelter from the follies and perils of human life as Auden seems to say in his poem Lay Your Sleeping Head My Love. In a world where dictators are thriving and posing a threat to peace and hunger is troubling both the rulers and the ruled, love is regarded by him as the only way out. Love can prove to be a unifying and sustaining force in the world facing degeneration and disintegration. Auden’s treatment of love is intellectual not emotional. That is he deals with love in an impersonal and detached manner. As is the case with his other themes, the theme of love has also been dealt with by him in the form of an expression of his ideas about it rather than a depiction of his own feelings and experience of it. Naturally there is a lack
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