Abstract.
Auden’s poetry is opaque and twisting, his love poetry exceptionally so. In a landscape dominated by passion, his love poetry is subdued and unintimate, callous and ironic. This essay will first explore the ways in which Auden’s poetry is an exploration of modernist themes and imagery, before elaborating on the way in which modernity and the modern human condition undermines and challenges conventional depictions and understanding of love. Ultimately, this essay will establish that Auden’s poetry manages to establish an authenticity and sincerity in love in spite of, and because of, these characteristics and through the use of irony. This essay concludes that Auden has cast away the illusions of modern love, in an attempt to explicate the true nature of modern love, which is complex and multi-valenced. He ultimately uses his craft to construct careful representation, and paradoxically uses irony to depict love more sincerely and honestly in his poetry.
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In his essay “Writing”, W.H. Auden makes a bold claim:
Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate (27).
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In these two sentences, Auden clearly delineates his conception of the role of poetry, as a means of “telling the truth”. This establishes his works as directed towards honest reflection and representation. The verbs “disenchant” as well as “disintoxicate”, add to this understanding of his purpose, truth-telling is not merely the act of conveying reality, but of removing that which obscures us from seeing clearly. To Auden, writing poetry is “not magic”, not supernaturally generative, neither involving conjuring cards nor invoking phantasms. Rather, it makes things apparent, exposes what is there. In “not [being] magic”, poetry may be said to be disillusioned, in its literal sense of no longer residing under illusion or the illusory. Irony works in very much the same way, the ironic subject can no longer be taken at face-value and must be examined more carefully for further meaning. Examining Auden’s love poetry, we now understand that he intends to use poetry to represent love honestly and truthfully, and specifically doing so by revealing it in its true nature, rather than in its constructed illusoriness. This essay argues that Auden uses poetry as a means to honestly depict love in all its complexities, and irony serves as his primary means of representation. Irony is used here as it manages to properly capture complexity, as well as allowing the reader to maintain sincerity and innocence despite. I agree with the statement insofar as Auden’s love poetry is indeed ironic, but I argue that the irony adds to rather than detracts from his work.
Modernity introduced a turning-over of traditional values and structures, famously illustrated by Maximilian Weber’s theory of “Entzauberung”, or “Disenchantment”, in which he depicts the corrosion of religion and faith in modern western society (qtd. in Illouz 20). Ella Illouz evokes Weber by suggesting that in modernity, “an ironic structure of feeling has come to pervade romantic relationships because of the ‘disenchantment’ or ‘rationalisation’ of love”(20). In applying Weber’s thinking about religion (in a sense, a sacred love) to romantic love, she associates romantic love with the expectation of wholehearted, faithful belief, and further, crucially, how that has become lost in modern times. This disenchantment of love “[creates] a strong ‘unreality effect’, making actors doubt love's reality and explicitly attend to the underlying ‘real’ causes for their love” (22). We see that loss of clear understanding and even reality in the “‘unreality effect’”, in which what was once unquestionable and undoubtable as stable reality has lost those qualities with the advent of modernity (26). The use of “disenchantment” here resonates with Auden’s own desire “to disenchant”; in context their meanings are identical, yet where Auden’s disenchantment leads to greater truthfulness and fuller representation, Illouz’s (and indirectly Weber’s) ‘disenchantment’ undermines the inherent and unquestionable existence of love, creating doubt in its representation (Illouz 20; Auden 27). The modern disenchanted individual becomes keenly aware of love as a constructed phenomenon, and thus seeks to establish its roots and causes. Rather than the mysteriously powerful force that compels, love becomes a human construct, and loses its sacred nature as a result. In this, we might begin to observe a tension in how love is ironically eroded and undermined by attempts to represent it truthfully and sincerely, without artifice. Modern love poetry is problematised by this tension, as love is rendered at once more and less real by honest depiction, and thus any attempts of representation fail in its purpose.
In “In Sickness and Health”, Auden represents love as it may exist, and in so doing, renders it complicatedly ironic (Selected Poems 120-123):
Dear, all benevolence of fingering lips
That does not ask forgiveness is a noise
At drunken feasts where Sorrow strips
To serve some glittering generalities:
Now, more than ever, we distinctly hear
The dreadful shuffle of a murderous year
And all our senses roaring as the Black
Dog leaps upon the individual back.
Whose sable genius understands too well
What code of famine can administrate
Those inarticulate wastes where dwell
Our howling appetites: dear heart, do not
Think lightly to contrive his overthrow;
O promise nothing, nothing, till you know
The kingdom offered by the love-lorn eyes
A land of condors, sick cattle, and dead flies. (120)
The poem begins with an uncomfortable address of “Dear” which implies a sense of intimacy towards the addressee of the poem (120). Reading unironically, we feel ourselves interlopers into an implicit intimacy, but an ironic understanding of the public nature of a published poem, makes the reader well aware that the poem is specifically intended for them and to be read by them. The reader is either rendered uncomfortable by the closeness of such an address, or the knowledge that he is intrusively reading, and because of the doubled reading that irony entails, both come into effect. The reader is both second person “Dear” and third-person voyeur, both privy to the intimate conversation and excluded, his relationship with the poem now tenuous (120). This double consciousness encompasses the ironic perspective, at once the sincere reader, who intrudes on intimacy, and the ironic reader, clearly aware he is the subject of that (admittedly unexpected) intimacy. Indeed, the poem continues with this trend of complicated and murky perception; “drunken feasts” and “glittering generalities” evoke a clouded, illusory world in which sight is slurred by alcohol or drawn to frivolity without substance (120). It is “[n]ow, more than ever” that “we distinctly hear”, our senses are sharp, even as they become distracted, the keen efficacy of our sight and taste falling prey to distractions that stimulate intensely (120). Reality becomes difficult for our senses to map, and thus our understanding of it becomes eroded. Auden acknowledges that we are aware of the limits of what we can perceive, and yet ironically shows that enhanced awareness renders us more blind, unable to see beyond the “inarticulate wastes” of “[o]ur howling appetites”. We are reminded of the “disenchantment”, and the requirement that in modernity we should seek to unearth the reality of love (Illouz 20). Beheld by these eyes, these “love-lorn” eyes, these eyes that seek love too keenly but find it not, is a ruin of “a land of condors, sick cattle and dead flies” (120). Auden cautions us that “Love’s imagination” conjures out “figures of destruction”, and “figures” here imply a distinctly rough means of representation, silhouettes and outlines that vaguely form (120). Indeed, he is concerned with how love invites speculation and generation, which disrupts perception and recognition, and indeed transforms the world itself, owing to that disruption, asking “[h]ow warped the mirrors where our worlds are made” (120). We end that stanza with “lies smash that which cannot be replaced” (120). These warped depictions become “lies” that in turn smashes the precious irreplaceable, which in contrast to the endlessly generated lies, must be the truth and reality. The poem thus establishes our perception of reality, and thus love as a subset of reality, as flawed, made murky. It also establishes that awareness of this lack of clarity becomes a problem, as we create figments and imaginations that represent falsely, in our attempts to clarify.
Constructing his poems, Auden has these same issues couched within the poetry’s style and form. In its title “In Sickness and Health”, as well as its dedication to what we presumed to be a married couple “For Maurice and Gwen Mandelbaum”, Auden appeared to be writing on the topic of marriage and sincere love but ironically depicts love as existing only in a superficial and fraught way (Auden, Selected Poems, 120). This depiction is further ironised by the fact that our keen attempts to discern love and its counterfeits are hampered by keenness. The first half of this poem illustrates to us the modern wasteland that has become so owing to our attempts to find the roots of love, and the speculations and imaginings that occur because we cannot truly find it. Auden problematises the human impulse to create connections when we cannot find them in his rhyme scheme, and in doing so, evokes these same problems when it comes to love. Each stanza tends to follow an ABABCCDD rhyme scheme, but these connections are often tenuous and challenging. Our first two stanzas omit the second B rhyme altogether, breaking the assumption set in place by the A rhyme, subverting our own tendencies towards pattern recognition and association. Auden continues in this trend of breakage, but even the manner in which these rhymes are broken, uneasy or clouded becomes inconsistent, there will be no solace found in even a pattern of disruptions. Auden depicts visual rhymes that merely impersonate connection, without true auditory confluence, “fear” and “bear”, “cry” and “ecstasy”, “hears” and “theirs”, “lives” and “loves” (120-121). As a visual metaphor this is certainly apt, in the searching for love’s meaning, what appears to be could be mistaken for what truly is. Sight, the first of sensations to take in the poem, which we have previously established as challenged in its keenness of perception, tricks us into believing the connection before we might even sound it out and hear the dissonance.
Auden comes back to irony in his turn of the poem, that which he had problematised is also the solution to its own problem. That conscious act of creation, of speculation and association, is what spurs the “Rejoice” (Auden, Selected Poems, 122). The italicised stanza here is an intrusion from “Love’s peremptory word”, and it will set the precedent for that which follows (122). “What talent for makeshift thought/A living corpus out of odds and ends” highlights the cobbled-together nature of thinking, in this context, about love (122). And it is in the collection and assemblage of the fragments that we may find anything to rejoice over. The selfish in “[p]re-occupied” and the base in “savage”, is transformed, elevated into a “dance” of “segregated charm”, now formalised and specifically delineated from others, and charming in that distinctness (122). It is also here where Auden transforms the rhyme scheme. Where he once laid visual rhymes, that pleased the eyes yet rang hollow to the ears, he now builds rhymes of distinct aural resonance that specifically look dissimilar. We are first presented with “ends” and “elements”, and we shall see further into the poem, “word” and “Absurd”, “light” and “excite”, “swear” and “square”, “we” and “parody”, “romance” and “Sands” (122-123). The artifice is now made apparent, his poetry is carefully constructed, and any pleasing connections between his words is intentional. Yet, the intentionality does not make it any less mellifluous and indeed we are the greater for it, for we witness masterfully his careful consideration of us. That is Auden’s love, a “conscious artifice” where we partake in the “arbitrary circle of a vow”, that we choose to believe in his pretence of sincerity (Auden is keenly aware of his use of irony) when he attempts to construct it, and the irony makes it such that the sincerity becomes apparent (122).
Umberto Eco once claimed that:
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her, `I love you madly', because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.’ At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated, both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love. (67-68)
While the quote itself specifically refers to the postmodern condition, it universally demonstrates the method through which one may adequately work through irony in his depiction of love, and I believe truly explicates Auden's own method. The “innocence” here links to the “enchanted love”, “an intensely meaningful experience that opens the self to a quasi-religious sense of transcendence”, that Illouz claims we have lost (Eco 67-68; Illouz 20). We are no longer able to experience love beyond the confines of our own mortal world and indeed the inherent meaningful nature has already dissolved. We find ourselves unable to articulate our love, for fear that “these words have already been written” and of the recurring mind game that occurs when “he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows)” continues ad infinitum (Eco 67-68). These games of guessing and anticipating, wholly constructed out of a mistrust, trap us in a loop of misunderstanding and insincerity for our words will always be misconstrued. And here Eco offers us the simple solution, simply to gesture to the artifice and show one’s hand, to use a game metaphor. In “having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman” (Eco 67-68).
Auden does the same with his own ironic love, gesturing to the constructs he builds as constructed, “the lie of our divinity afresh”, within the poem itself (Auden, Selected Poems, 122). That he constructs them does not detract, for he “[manufactures] in [his] flesh”, every act of making an act of love, of toil and of consideration (122). We return here to the original quote that we examined “to disenchant” (Auden, “Writing”, 27). Auden does not destroy the illusion as we had but rather reveals the mechanism of the illusion, so that we may “[not] by our choice but our consent” accept this simulacrum of love, knowing it to be false (122). “In Sickness and in Health” continues by reckoning love as a product of a continuous action, where in addressing it, “Force our desire…To seek Thee always in Thy substance”, it invokes the necessity of searching for love in all that we see (122). It is in this act of searching that “Our bodies, [love’s] opaque enigmas” are able to “Configure [love’s] transparent justice” (122). This juxtaposition embodies the transformative power of this act, “those offices”, as a deed done for others, that will in some ways work for oneself (122). In the evocation of love’s light, which “excite” “such intense vibrations”, “we give forth a quiet”, and yet again the poem holds two contrasting ideas together, to a productive back and forth, an “intense [vibration]”, that keeps the subject tethered to one location but never static (123). This will be the state that lets love be roughly observed, never fixed, constantly flitting between different meanings, indeterminate but contained. With this knowledge, Auden cautions the reader not to “wither”, “petrify”, “freeze” or remain “inert”, gesturing towards that sense of perpetual adjustment and tension as key towards maintaining some measure of understanding of love (122). “Love, permit/Temptations always endanger [our love]”, is what Auden wishes most of all, realising that love exists only with the possibility of it no longer existing and that conscious act of stretching away from loss (122). Irony exists in this same plane, it only may exist with the possibility of sincerity, and it is that reaching away from sincerity that denotes it ironic. To depict a love that is so inherently unstable in meaning, the artifice of Auden’s representation will have to be similarly complex and meaningful.
We may turn to “But I Can’t”, “arguably the finest villanelle in the language”, to deal with Auden and complex representation of love, and the use of irony to achieve a proper representation (Lehman 159).
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so. (119)
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The poem presents to us, quite artfully a reluctance or inability to speak, a holding of the tongue that can only promise intention, not actual action, embodied in the hypothetical “If” (Auden, Selected Poems, 119). This mirrors the caution that Auden encourages with attempting to represent reality we have already established. The poem’s language represents a dearth of absolute knowledge in which even certainties like “must'' can only be tied to assumptions, vague terms like “somewhere”, “reasons”, “suppose” and “perhaps” that qualify and make uncertain any assertions (119). The title ironically plays on this, as the definite answer to the hypothetical raised by “If I could tell you, I would let you know”, and yet only exists outside the poem proper[1] (119). Auden combines images of transience, in “wind”, “decay”, “go” and “run away”, with the artifice of the “show” of the “clowns'' or the “play” of the “musicians” (119). That which is constructed becomes tied to the uncertain and the transient, with the result that there is no longer any surety or predictability, “no fortunes to be told” means any anticipation becomes pointless (119). This becomes ironic when we consider that this Auden expresses his conclusions regarding uncertainty and indefinability in the poetic form of the villanelle, heavily structured in its dual rhymes, strict five tercets and singular quatrain, and thus predictable in the unchanging structure of form. All that Auden can say for certain, that he can put into concrete form, is that he cannot say anything certainly. This sense of uncertain reality is imposed onto love, “[b]ecause I love you more than I can say” evokes that same speechlessness, that same inability to convey and to communicate (119). While love is the reason the persona stretches against the limits of his speech, the reason the poem exists, it too is uniquely intertwined with that which renders speech impossible. The villanelle, with its intricate chain, a repetition of the same two rhymes, reiterates this phenomenon. The ABA rhyme insistently separates the lines that make sense together, creating a line gap in the reading that delays that instant gratification, blissful joining and, more importantly, fitting. We are tantalised and rebuffed, the two lovers kept apart by the chasm that is the B rhyme (or the blank void of the line break). In speaking of the difficulty to represent one’s own feelings and thoughts and the continuous struggle to keep doing so “[b]ecause I love you”, the poem renders to us love in a modern time, continuously estranged and impeded (119). What breaks this constant state of longing and unreaching, is the rhetorical question that begins the couplets, “Will Time say nothing but I told you so?” (119). This question reverses the repeated line that serves as the motif of the entire poem, transforming it from a concrete statement of fact to a statement of doubt, a reconsidering, and an admission of uncertainty. This question breaks the tercet cycle, allowing for a final coupling of the last two A rhymes, together at last. This question is claimed as rhetorical not because we are expected to know the answer, but rather that we are expected to not, and to all accept that, effectively creating that same unity, but of noncomprehension rather than comprehension. What you will begin to see is that by first linking love to the sense of unspeakability or uncertainty, and then showing how that uncertainty perpetuates joining and completion, Auden manages to present to us a situation in which uncertainty, complexity or the unspeakable is something that enables love, or at the very least facilitates it, without which love cannot truly exist. And indeed, irony becomes that very tool that enables Auden that multi-valenced representation.
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It may then be pertinent for us to understand the device through which Auden manifests this reality of love. Irony, in D.C. Muecke’s definition of it, exists as “a double-layered or two-storey phenomenon”(19). Muecke contends that any ironic situation relies on a duality of interpretation, that a situation exists, “at the lower level”, as “it appears to the victim of irony…or as it is deceptively presented, and also, “[at] the upper level”, as “it appears to the observer or the ironist” (19). Irony also requires that these two understandings of the situation are obscured from each other, through “contradiction, incongruity, or incompatibility” (19-20). The final requirement is “an element of ‘innocence’”, in which one party is “confidently unaware” or “pretends not to be aware” of “an upper level or point of view” (20). What it comes down to, is differing perspectives that each believe itself to be true, and for the perspective that is wrong to maintain that belief owing to an unawareness, affected or otherwise, of its falsehood. Irony allows both positions to exist at odds with one another, and for opinions that contradict or fail to cohere, to remain. An ironic statement has to also be read sincerely, for without sincerity (or a performed sincerity), the irony ceases to be. Auden is renowned for the intricate craft of his poems, and as such we may assume that in any ironic depictions, he is definitely aware of the discrepancy and thus that discrepancy is intentional. His irony is thus a purposeful one, using a pretence towards sincerity, to create the effect of irony[2]. Thus both sincerity and irony are artifice in Auden’s work, and in depicting love, will feature strongly.
As we have now established, irony is a tool that enables sincerity as well, given that it posits the existence of sincerity as a condition for irony to exist. The form, ironically contradictory in its deviation from the themes of the poem, becomes Auden’s way of inserting irony, for the form is both most apparent and yet subordinate to the words themselves. In examining the etymology of the term “villanelle'', from the Italian “villano”, or “peasant”, we discover an origin that directly contrasts with Blythe’s description of it as the symbol of “English ‘decadence’”, whose “frivolity of form and subject…are mocked by James Joyce” and presumably the other Modernists (OED; Blythe 16). This renders the existence of the villanelle unstable, for it both is the rural folk song, as well as the lush symbol of luxurious indulgence. The villanelle in itself is a form that contradicts itself, its name and situation ironically opposed. Irony here allows the villanelle to both exist as order and knowability in its strict form, as well as itself a duplicitous and undefined framework, that fits perfectly with the uncertainty of the poem’s themes. The regularity of the rhymes and stanzaic structure is small compared to the larger complexity of the form’s own etymological drift, and thus, existential drift. Yet in irony’s ability to allow contradictory elements to coexist, Auden has built some manner of structure to weather the chaos and complexity, built out of uncertain speech from an impulse of love, “[b]ecause I love you more than I can say” (119). This connects us back to the idea of Auden’s “conscious artifice” (120). Heaney, in his essay “Sounding Auden” (1987), compares the openings of Auden’s poems to a vessel on rapid waters, claiming “the craft itself felt watertight and shipshape, but its motions seemed unpredictable, it started in mid-pitch and wobbled” (Heaney). Here he uses the pun of craft as watercraft and craft as poetic skill, to depict Auden’s own poetry as a lone place of stability and regularity surrounded by chaos and unpredictability, much like what we have already established. Irony, as Auden’s tool, is this “conscious artifice”, the structure that at once, drifts and sways with the complexity of representation, instead of upright resistance, and also reveals itself to be intentionally constructed, thus still being truthful about its duplicitous nature (120).
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This culminates in the poem “The More Loving One”, one of Auden’s later poems. In the “stars” of the poem, we not only observe the astronomical objects, but also the astrological, the celestial wanderers that were once thought divine. The rationalisation, “disenchantment” of these stars has diminished them from emblems of the divine to clouds of gas and plasma (Ilouz 16). This mirrors love, earlier depicted as also eroded by modernity, rendered meagre and finite. And irony becomes the core of the relationship between the star and the persona, in which we expect an impassioned excitement at the poetic image of the stars and the heavens above, the poet dryly states that “stars” no longer dictate the fate of man, and have become apathetic and uncaring, “for all they care, I can go to hell” (Auden, Selected Poems, 246). Without the gaze of the celestial, the divine, “indifference is the least/We have to dread from man or beast”, the Earth becomes untamed and uncontained, there now exists danger (246). There even exists a subtle irony here, where the poet’s persona worries about the indifference of “stars” far above his own head, whilst the specific attention of those around him is what should draw his “dread” (246). Auden goes on to posit his own hypothetical, a romantic imagining: “How should we like it were stars to burn/With a passion for us we could not return?” (246). He returns to the stars a type of vitality, a magic of feeling and yearning, reminiscent of the “enchanted love” we have since lost (Ilouz 16). Yet this question is also rhetorical, the answer is we would not like it one bit. The love that we attempt to impose upon the stars, the “passion for us”, is too much to handle and “we could not return [that love]” (246). Negotiating that love, “If equal affection cannot be/Let the more loving one be me”, the poet decides the apathetic reaction to be more desirable than the impassioned one, he will take the difficult truth over the illusion that is too difficult to “return” (246). In spite of this magnanimous gesture, the persona immediately follows it up with:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day. (246)
And this rush of irony, of a triumphant declaration of unconditional love followed immediately by a demonstration of apathy, highlights the incongruity between our expectations of grand love, and the reality of love’s feelings. Auden is careful to establish an uncertainty, with “I think I am” and “I cannot…say” qualifying the grand statement he previously made (246). With this irony, he undercuts any implications of that grandiose, self-sacrificing love in his statement, it becomes a measured, realistic response.
The poem manages to avoid any sentimentality or clichés with love, but at the same time, manages to evoke a sense of sincerity. The last stanza continues with:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time. (246)
In examining this poem, we see Auden’s process of representing love; in the careful processing of emotions, a gradual thinking-through and consideration that lets us know the process, the intermediate steps that lead to a final constructed conclusion. This is not the immediate impulses, the flashes of hot-blooded emotions that have become clichés and thus insincere. The persona is well-aware of the necessity of stars in his life, or rather lack thereof, and he knows that he can simply “look at an empty sky/And feel its total dark sublime” “[w]ere all stars to disappear or die” (246). There is no deep yearning or defiant anger, merely a quiet resignation. Yet, this poem seeps a quiet melancholy, an understated sense of loss. In “die” and “empty” and “total dark”, the persona mourns the loss, using whatever “little time” he has (246). And this quiet grief resembles reality much more than fevered cries, or bitter laments, representing love far more cuttingly, in that honesty. Here, Auden is able to render love in a sincere and honest fashion, using irony to explicate his care and consideration for the topic.
In seeking “to disenchant”, Auden has cast away the illusions of modern love, in an attempt to explicate the true nature of modern love, which is complex and multi-valenced (Auden, “Writing” 27). He uses his craft to construct careful representation, and paradoxically uses irony to depict love more sincerely and honestly in his poetry. In doing so, I agree that Auden has not managed to treat love unironically but has managed to use irony to speak about love more effectively and carefully.
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Works Cited
Auden, W. H. “But I Can’t” Selected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson, Faber, 2010.
---. “In Sickness and Health” Selected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson, Faber, 2010.
---. “The More Loving One” Selected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson, Faber, 2010.
---. “Writing” The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. Random House, 1962.
Blyth, Caroline. “Introduction” Decadent Verse: An Anthology of Late Victorian Poetry, 1872-1900. Anthem Press, 2009, pg 16.
Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. Translated by William Weaver, London, Minerva, 1994, pp. 67-68.
Heaney, Seamus. “Seamus Heaney · Sounding Auden · LRB 4 June 1987.” London Review of Books, London Review of Books, 30 June 2022, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n11/seamus-heaney/sounding-auden.
Illouz, Eva. “Love and Its Discontents: Irony, Reason, Romance.” The Hedgehog Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, pp. 18–32.
Lehman, David. “The Uncollected Auden.” Poetry, vol. 131, no. 3, 1977, pp. 159–64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20592887. Accessed 20 Oct. 2022.
Muecke, D. C. The Compass of Irony. Methuen, 1969.
"villanelle, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/223435. Accessed 26 October 2022.
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Endnotes
[1] In fact, the first and more popular title for the poem is “If I Could Tell You”, but this ironic response was the title more favoured by Auden (Lehman).
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[2] In reading Auden outside of his own time and context, unintentional irony that arises from shifts in society, or history, or even language, might occur but as far as our purposes go, that remains outside the scope of Auden’s choices in poetry. These instances will thus go unremarked on, except for this footnote.