Auden's England

Deane, Patrick; Smith, Stan

doi:10.1017/ccol0521829623.003

Cited by 1 publication

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“…42 Auden invested 'the North' with aesthetic and intellectual virtues that had a magnetic attraction: 'North must seem the "good" direction, the way of heroic adventures, South the way to ignoble ease and decadence'. 43 Auden professed to favour colder climes rather than warmer ones. His northern sensibility was not restricted to the North of England; he visited Iceland in 1936 with Louis MacNeice to satisfy his passion for Norse sagas, ice and austere landscapes.…”

Section: Rookhope In Audenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The extraordinary result was a 5-day itinerary in which Auden, inevitably, beseeched his readers to ignore London and Windsor and head to the Pennines, 'that chain of limestone hills which runs due North up the centre of England from Derbyshire to Northumberland'. 51 The fifth day involved a trip from Dufton in Westmoreland to Blanchland, on the border between County Durham and Northumberland, via Rookhope. Although it had been years since he had visited the region, he describes the journey accurately and poignantly: ".…”

Section: Rookhope In Audenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…." 52 Landscape for Auden provides both a point of reference for his poetic enterprise and a rich source of metaphors for human nature. Limestone, the bedrock of the northern Pennines, offers the most fecund store of inspiration.…”

Section: Rookhope In Audenmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Amor Loci: Auden in Rookhope

Tomaney

2022

cultural geographies

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I present a conspectus of the imaginative geography of the English poet WH Auden. This imaginative geography is avowedly the product of a rootless, cosmopolitan which extols domestic virtues against the backcloth of an originary poetic homeland in Rookhope in the Northern Pennines of England. Auden’s poetry addresses eternal questions about the conditions under which communities thrive or decline, what dividends they bestow upon their members, the costs and benefits of choosing to cultivate local knowledge and attachments and how communities coexist at different scales. Auden’s topopoetics reflects his search for affective bonds in a life marked otherwise by placelessness. It is a quest for a sense of place in the absence of insideness – in this respect it affects more widespread concerns of how to belong to place in an age of hyper-globalisation. Although the landscape of the Northern Pennines held a profound aesthetic attraction for Auden, it was the numinous experience of his youth in Rookhope that allowed him to attach his poetic and personal biography to the place and ascribe its meaning. This amounted to a kind of elective belonging, albeit stripped of any sociological connotation or political commitment.

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Section: Rookhope In Audenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Rookhope In Audenmentioning

confidence: 99%