The Concept of Love in Auden's Poetry: A Modernistic Approach

Abstract

This study examines the treatment of love in the poetry of W.H. Auden in the context of modernism. The texts examined in this research are As I Walked Out One Evening and O Tell Me the Truth About Love. The findings reveal that Auden challenges and problematizes notions of love depicted in normative and romanticized understandings of love as stable, enduring, and unaffected by time and human limitations. Using a qualitative textual analysis approach, this study shows how Auden uses irony, humor, and everyday language, to highlight the inconsistencies between the expectations that are set up by the idealized beauty and nature of love and the reality where love exists. The findings show that As I Walked Out One Evening reveals the inevitability of time eroding youthful promises, whereas O Tell Me the Truth About Love reveals love’s indefinite and elusive qualities through jocular and ironic proclamations. Each of the poems represent modernist characteristics of modernism as the poems encapsulate the ways in which modernism is characterized by fragmentation, skepticism, and the rejection of objective norms and certainties. The modernist characteristics we can observe from Auden’s construction of love is his snarky redefinition of love as imperfect, but indeed profound. Therefore, Auden captures modernist anxiety while providing a realist account that resonates with the reader today.