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From Error to Terror: The Romantic Inheritance in W. H. Auden’s 'In Time of War' | Partial Answers

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From Error to Terror: The Romantic Inheritance in W. H. Auden’s 'In Time of War'

  • Frederik Van Dam

Date Published:

4 January 2022

Abstract:

In 1937, the English poet W. H. Auden travelled to China to report on the second Sino-Japanese War. His experience led to the writing of a sonnet sequence “In Time of War,” in which the poet reflects on this particular conflict while levelling a critique at Romantic theories of the aesthetic. In Auden’s critique, the present article suggests, the concept of the creature emerges as a site of reconciliation, a site where differences are allowed to co-exist. The co-existence of differences is also mimicked in the poem’s literary style: its language, its play with sound, and its manipulation of syntax create a paratactical aesthetic that joins disparate elements in a relational (rather than a hierarchical) structure. By attending to the vagaries of meaning and form, this inquiry concludes that “In Time of War” differs from other literary responses to aerial bombing by attempting to instill a cosmopolitan attitude in its readers.

October 2021: Frederik Van Dam is Assistant Professor of European Literature at Radboud University, Nijmegen. His research includes Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form (2016), The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope (2019), and an issue on literature and economics in the European Journal of English Studies (2017). He is the literature editor of the journal English Text Construction and has created a documentary about the literary critic J. Hillis Miller, The Pleasure of that Obstinacy. He is currently developing a project that will focus on literary contributions to the imagination of peace in the interwar period.

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 01/16/2022