Unrequited Love In Auden's Poetry

Throughout Auden’s work, the poet explores subjects which refer to the complexity of being human such as suffering. Indeed, in the majority of the poems we have studied, Auden links pain that comes from being human to love, time, war and religion. Still, in other poems, Auden emphasizes the necessity of moving on a difficult position. As a consequence, I will examine to what extent Auden explores the suffering that comes from being human in his poems.
Firstly, Auden uses unrequited love to challenge the cliché of perfect love in order to demonstrate how we can suffer when we are not loved back. In “The more loving one”, the reader can see the process of evolution of love presented in a negative way as it disappears. Consequently, Auden refers to love as one of the main cause of suffering. We can make a parallel between this poem and “September, 1st 1939” …show more content…
In “As I walked out one evening”, Auden presents at the beginning a positive aspect of love which soon deteriorate because of time. We can notice the presence of growing up with “O look, look in the mirror” and “As the tears scald and start” which insists on the impossibility for time to stop. As a consequence, time is more powerful than love which leads inevitably to suffering. We can identify this same rupture in “Spain” which retraces the country’s history. It evolves from a very flourishing and fertile past to an accumulation of bad events. History is a subject mostly used by Auden to demonstrate human’s suffering notably with wars evoked in “The Shield of Achilles” or “Epitaph on a Tyrant”. Dictatorship is major theme in Auden’s poems as it recalls a whole population brainwashed which suffer of the fact that they are not individuals anymore. Indeed, the totalitarian state replaced the individual. In “The Shield of Achilles”, the poet bitterly compares the Achean world with his present totalitarian world to show that history repeats