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    A Study Guide for WH Auden's "Refugee Blues"
    A Study Guide for WH Auden's "Refugee Blues"
    A Study Guide for WH Auden's "Refugee Blues"
    Ebook41 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for WH Auden's "Refugee Blues"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for WH Auden's "Refugee Blues", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJan 18, 2018
    ISBN9781535846066
    A Study Guide for WH Auden's "Refugee Blues"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for WH Auden's "Refugee Blues" - Gale

      17

      Refugee Blues

      W. H. Auden

      1939

      Introduction

      W. H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden wrote Refugee Blues in March 1939. The poem was first published in the New Yorker on April 15, 1939. The context becomes apparent halfway through the poem, when Hitler is first mentioned. The rest of the poem reads like a universal lament over the inhumane situations refugees have faced throughout history. The poet, speaking to someone dear to him, is explaining just what a refugee's situation entails by describing precisely the situation in which he and the dear one find themselves. Among other Auden collections, Refugee Blues can be found in the definitive Collected Poems (1974) and in Selected Poems (1979), both edited by Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor.

      Author Biography

      Auden was born on February 21, 1907, in York, England, as the third of three sons of a nurse and a physician. His mother was a devout Anglo-Catholic with musical accomplishments. His father was the first city-appointed school medical officer in Birmingham, where the family moved in 1908. Auden began making important connections in his first preparatory school, St. Edmund's, in Surrey, where he met his lifelong friend, the novelist Christopher Isherwood. In his next school, Gresham's, in Norfolk, Auden discovered through his attraction to a classmate that he was gay. Later, a newspaper copy editor in his early twenties grew attracted to Auden and became an important mentor and platonic acquaintance. Auden matriculated at Christ Church College, Oxford University, at first to study science but eventually with a focus on English literature.

      Auden twice served as coeditor of the university's student verse anthology, Oxford Poetry, and like Auden, several of his close acquaintances—namely, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Cecil Day-Lewis—went on to become esteemed poets. Spender in particular helped privately print, by hand, some fortyfive copies of Auden's earliest collection, Poems (1928). Upon graduating, Auden traveled to Germany to meet Isherwood, who was teaching English there, and the two took advantage of the licentious bohemian Weimar arts scene while it lasted. Returning to England in 1929, Auden became an educator. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Richard Johnson describes him as an enthusiastic, eccentric, inventive, and popular schoolmaster. Having established for himself through intellectual—as well as bohemian—circles a reputation as an up-andcoming poet, Auden soon signed on with a major publisher, Faber & Faber, which issued collections including another Poems (1930) and The Dance of Death (1934).

      Auden's visits to Germany gave

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