Poets of the crossroads: Politics and the deliberation of poetry in the 1930s

Examining poetic responses to political disturbance, the present dissertation considers the work of the British poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), and the Armenian poet Eghishe Charents (1897 1937), as three case studies in the relationship between poetry and politics in the 1930s. While each of these major poets has been studied seriously within his own tradition, this study brings together for the first time these three poets and their work in the 1930s for a comparative analysis of poetry written under conditions of political repression, ideological pressure, and historical upheaval.; Two critical myths have influenced how poetry of the 1930s has been read: the modernist myth of the autonomy of art, and the 1930s myth of art's political orthodoxy. The dissertation questions the validity of interpreting the poet's role and work solely as either a stable position of artistic autonomy or a position of political commitment, and examines the varying symbolic fgurations of politics in the poetry and the political presence of the poetry in the world. By reading selected poems closely and examining the terms the poets themselves use to define their political and social roles, the dissertation develops a new critical vocabulary with which to describe the orientation of each poet and his work toward the political realm.; The study concludes that the poetic responses by these three poets to political disturbance---Auden's antipolitics, Mandelstam's civic poetics, and Charents' visionary historicism---exceed the confined binary theories of autonomy and commitment by means of their variability and complexity. They do not exhaust all the possibilities for political poetry but remain relevant for readers and later poets at political crossroads, such as Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky.; In addition to introducing Charents to non-Armenian readers, and broadening the understanding of Mandelstam and Auden within a comparative context, the dissertation contributes to the literature on aesthetics and politics, and opens a new dimension in the consideration of how the 1930s constituted a fertile period for poetry, even though it remains the period, in Soviet history in particular, in which a generation of poets was destroyed.