W. H. Auden: Elegy for a Jew who died in exile

Abstract

This paper reexamines Auden’s elegy In memory of Sigmund Freud through the lenses of Auden’s own exile in America. The transference of artistic experiences, attitudes and cultural concerns displayed by Auden allows the reader to glimpse at the complex condition of his exile at the end of the thirties. Leading to the analysis of this condition this paper revises Auden’s political changes at that crossroad, the cultural options offered by America at that time, his poetic reorientation as evinced in In H. Memory of W. Yeats, his relation with Chester Kallman and approach to the Jewish religious tradition and its impact in The Age of Anxiety. The psychoanalytic reading of the elegy tries to capture the resonance of these experiences and some of their biographical background.