Ladislav Vít: A Quest for Form ‒ Meta-poetic Aspects of Auden’s Letters from Iceland

In 1936 W. H. Auden received an exquisite offer. Faber and Faber commissioned him to write a travel book about his journey to Iceland, a location which had always been a lodestone for his thought and emotion. Since childhood Iceland had ranked very high in Auden’s mythical geography of unique and sacred places. Yet Auden was reluctant to produce a panegyric; instead he set out to look for an adequate form. This presentation approaches Letters from Iceland (1937) as a text in which Auden eclipses his personal topophilic bias and predilection for praising his sacred island in a reverent timbre. The paper argues that Letters from Iceland could be read as a meta-poetic quest for a suitable form and as a series of debates on what Auden considered to be the major flaw of poetry: its generic incapacity to engage with topographical detail in ways allowing it to stand out as a location hallowed with uniqueness and superiority.

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