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Concentrating on W. H. Auden's work from the late 1930s, when he seeks to understand the poet's responsibility in the face of a triumphant fascism, to the late 1950s, when he discerns an irreconcilable "divorce" between poetry and history in light of industrialized murder, this startling new study reveals the intensity of the poet's struggles with the meanings of history. Through meticulous readings, significant archival findings, and critical reflection, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb presents a new image and understanding of Auden's achievement and reveals how his version of modernism illuminates urgent contemporary issues and theoretical paradigms: from the meaning of marriage equality to the persistence of fascism; from critical theory to psychoanalysis; from precarity to postcolonial studies. "The muse does not like being forced to choose between Agit-prop and Mallarmé," Auden writes with characteristic lucidity, and this study elucidates the probity, humor, and technical skill with which his responses to historical reality in the mid-twentieth century illuminate our world today.
"Auden and the Muse of History brings new depths to Auden studies, while bringing Auden's work into sharp and revelatory focus. Gottlieb shows how the poems speak forcefully to today's world, while also showing how deeply rooted they were in the world where they were written."—Edward Mendelson, Columbia University
"Gottlieb's excellent close readings of poems and [her] efforts to situate Auden within his cultural moment will be informative for a broad range of readers. The writing style is accessible, which further recommends the book as useful to nonspecialists. Highly recommended."—J. W. Moffett, CHOICE
"Gottlieb invites us to recognize the contemporary import of Auden's critiques of dishonest history-making—above all in his self-retractions and his gestures toward poems that cannot be written, whether about the Shoah or as a self-verifying expression of 'I love you.' What she has made, herself, is a work that may be called 'academic literary criticism' but whose form and argument pay homage to other genres as well: poetry, of course, but also music, whose muse is not Clio at all."—Richard R. Bozorth, Genre
1. States of Marriage
2. Poetry, Prose, and a Forgotten Practice
3. "Civilization Must Be Saved"
Interlude: Interlude: The Falling Empire
4. Isotopes of Love
5. From Poem to Volume
6. Anthropology, Hell, "Goodbye"
Coda: Closing and Opening Thoughts