| This dissertation is a study of the most important sources of the twentieth-century British poet W. H. Auden. My first chapter examines the influence of Thomas Hardy's poetry on Auden's career. In his early poems Auden made much use of what he referred to as Hardy's panoramic "hawk's vision." But however enthusiastic Auden may have been about the "hawk's vision" early in his career, he later attempted to correct Hardy's super-human perspective with poems in which he emphasized individuality and choice.My second chapter is a discussion of structural allusion in Auden's early poetry. I argue that in such poems as "O Where Are You Going," "Paysage Moralise," and "On This Island," Auden invented a new kind of allusion, very different from the more local allusions of his contemporaries, in which one poem alludes---through both its form and content---to an entire earlier poem. As with his revisions of Hardy's "hawk's vision," Auden often criticizes some aspect of his originals but by doing so from within, using the earlier poems as models rather than targets, he also implies a remarkably generous attitude toward his poetic past.My next chapter concerns Auden's elegies, which I suggest are strangely anti-elegiac because of the very mixed feelings that he displays toward his subjects---Yeats, Freud, Henry James and others. Treating both these subjects and, more broadly, the entire elegiac tradition as "sources" of Auden's poetry, I argue that the ambivalence that governed Auden's attitude toward a particular author (Hardy) and a particular literary device (allusion) determined his relation to a poetic genre---the elegy---as well.In my fourth and final chapter I examine Soren Kierkegaard's influence on Auden, showing how an immersion in the Danish philosopher's work affected his poetry of the late 1930's and 1940's. Kierkegaard's presence can be felt in many of Auden's short poems of this period, as well as in longer poems like New Year Letter and The Sea and the Mirror. But just as Hardy's "hawk's vision" could only entrance Auden for so long, Kierkegaard soon became the target of Auden's respectful scorn, and he attempted to redress Kierkegaard's blindness to the more mundane aspects of human life---the body in particular---with poems and essays of his own. |
