Consider Auden as an Anti Romantic Poet. Auden as an Anti-Romantic Poet

Among the modern English poets, Auden ranks in importance next only to T.S. Eliot. Auden’s early poetry had some traces of Romanticism but he cannot be designated as a romantic poet. In his conception of anti-romanticism, Auden was much influenced by Eliot’s Essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.


Auden’s poetic theory and his practice during his long career as a poet establish him as an anti-romantic poet. According to him, a poet must have no decided opinion to put into his poetry. He must be clinical and dispassionate about life. While he composes his poems, he must remain detached from his own feelings. Thus like T. S. Eliot he is an anti-romantic poet.

There is an apparent lack of emotion in the poems of Auden. He rejected poetry as a magical means of inducing emotions in the poet and the readers, and accepted the view that poetry is a ‘game of knowledge’. This knowledge of good and evil leads us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice.

Auden is anti-romantic in his treatment of nature. Auden never sees nature in any of the traditional ways. He does not portray it, like the Georgians of like the nineteenth century poets, hold it up as an example to escape from the industrial city.

In his treatment of love, Auden is not a romantic but realistic, since his love poetry meditates rather than emotes. The most remarkable feature of his treatment of love is that it distinguishes his poetry from the traditional English love poetry by its significant intellectual content and effect. In ‘Lullaby’, the lover speaker is aware of the mortal and guilty nature of his beloved, and of his own faithlessness. But both are human beings and prone to weakness. Hence the lover finds his beloved entirely beautiful and desirable or lovable in spite of all her faults. Thus in his treatment of love Auden is also anti-romantic.


To sum up, in his conception and practice of poetry, Auden is clearly anti-romantic. By temperament he has been a counter romantic. He has been hostile to that spirit which swells the writer’s ego.

The Shield of Achilles”

The Shield of Achilles” is a nine-stanza poem that uses an episode from Homer’s ancient Greek epic Iliad (c. 800 b.c.e.; Eng. trans., 1616) to meditate on the violence and brutality of the modern world. The poem begins with an unnamed woman looking over the shoulder of an unnamed man; the two are named in the last stanza, but those who know the Iliad well will immediately recognize from the poem’s title that the woman is the goddess Thetis, the mother of the Greek hero Achilles. The man over whose shoulder she looks is Hephaestos, the god of fire and metal-working, who is commissioned by Thetis in book 18 of the Iliad to make a shield for Achilles to carry into battle. In the first stanza, Thetis looks to see how Hephaestos is decorating the shield. Expecting to see conventional symbols of victory and power, she sees instead that Hephaestos has used images of “an artificial wilderness” and a “sky like lead.”

The next two stanzas depict in sharper detail the images engraved or embossed on the shield: a barren plain filled with expressionless people standing in line, “waiting for a sign.” As they stand, a voice comes from above declaring the justice of “some cause.” Without discussion or reflection, the people march away in lines to serve that cause, which eventually brings them to grief.

In the fourth stanza, the poem returns to Thetis. Where she expects to see “ritual pieties” in the forms of sacrificial cows and ceremonial offerings, she finds instead “Quite another scene.” Again, the following two stanzas describe the scenes depicted on the shield. This time, she sees a barbed-wire enclosure, where bored sentries and a crowd of detached observers watch as three figures are crucified. “They” have no hope, no pride, and the lines are written so that “they” might be the crucified figures—the crowd, or the sentries, or all three. They have lost their humanity, and “died as men before their bodies died.”

The seventh stanza returns to Thetis and Hephaestos. Thetis looks this time for athletes and dancers, symbols of strength and agility. Instead of a playing field or dance floor, she finds a “weed-choked field.” The only person in that field, as described in stanza 8, is a poor and dirty boy with nowhere to go and nothing to do but idly throw a stone at a bird. The only world he knows is one of rape and murder and betrayal; he knows nothing of tenderness or compassion.

As the poem ends, Hephaestos finishes his work and limps away and Thetis has her first full look at the shield. She is horrified by what she sees, and by the thought that her son will carry representations of violence and cruelty into battle. In the last line of the poem, the narrator points out something that neither Thetis nor Hephaestos knows: that Achilles himself will soon die in the war against Troy.