Irony and Sarcasm in W.H. Auden’s Poems

483 Words2 Pages
Irony and Sarcasm in W.H. Auden’s Poems Abstract. This paper will deal with the stylistic analysis of W.H. Auden’s poems, more specifically, with the use of irony and sarcasm in his poems “The Unknown Citizen”, “O What Is That Sound?” and “As I Walked Out One Evening”. W. H. Auden was an eminent Anglo-American modern poet who produced a great variety of poems in various styles and on a wide range of subjects. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. Politics, citizenship, religion and morals are some of the central themes in his poetry. According to Edward Mendelson, Auden’s concept of language was that it was both original and imitative: it is spoken by different voices but at the same time taught by listening to the voices of others. Auden’s poetry reflects this, while simultaneously rebelling against T.S. Eliot’s notion that traditional forms of poetry were too ordered for the chaotic of modern times. Auden wrote poems on modern themes in conventional verse forms and what is inherent in such a poetic style, as this paper aims to show, is the use of irony with the aim to examine whether the conventional poetic form was more acceptable to the readers and if it was, whether it would be applicable for subversive activities. As a literary technique, irony uses discordance and incongruity to say something other than the poem's literal meaning; sarcasm is an indirect form of speech intentionally used to produce a particular dramatic effect on the listener. According to John Haiman, what is essential to sarcasm is that it is overt irony intentionally used by the speaker as a form of verbal aggression. This paper attempts to show, by referring to these literary and linguistic devices, how Auden tries to highlight the crisis of the modern man in
Open Document