W.H. Auden and the Poetics of Transport

Résumé 0

This article investigates W.H. Auden’s interest in transport, and how transport—mainly trains and airplanes—influenced his work. On the one hand, the poetry of the 1930s questions romantic prejudices against the railway, praising the locomotive as the modern muse in verse inspired by the very materiality of trains, as well as by Cubism, Futurism, and jazz music. On the other hand, the rise of Nazism coincided with the increasing use of deportation and death trains, which haunt the dramatic poems of the 1940s. Auden was one of the first British poets to allude to concentration camps in his work, with the packed wagons of The Age of Anxiety (1944-46) acting as metonymies for the camps themselves. In his later texts, descriptions of public transport often portray a world on the brink of ruin, where art can only afford a few transient escapes from waiting rooms peopled by dehumanized, erring souls.