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Like many others in the class, I too was intrigued by W.H. Auden’s article. I found Auden’s article to be rather amusing and an interesting weaving of art, politics, and society.

Some have already commented on the article’s opening paragraph, but I thought I would as well. When I first read Auden’s comments about so many young people wanting to be writers, or specifically creative writers, my first instinct was to check and see when the article was written. Knowing that the article was written in 1962 definitely helps to give some context to Auden’s comments.

I point this out because I simply don’t see Auden’s comments as being as applicable today as they were in 1962. I think there has been a general shift away from the arts and toward more capitalistic professions (i.e. where the money is), and I personally don’t know of many young people who want to go into creative writing. Maybe it’s just me, but what do others think? Do you think that there has been some shifting in what Auden addresses in his first paragraph? Auden also states that an artistic vocation is harder (in 1962) than it used to be. I would argue that it is even harder now.

I also wanted to comment quickly on Theodor Adorno’s articles. I found Adorno’s argument to be rather dense and complicated, though I did appreciate much of what he said. Specifically, I liked the philosophical elements of his article and how he links poetry and society. He write that one must not focus only on the social interests or social perspectives of poems or their authors, and instead one must “discover how the entirety of a society, conceived as an internally contradictory unity, is manifested in the work of art, in what way the work of art remains subject to society and in what way it transcends it” (344). Poetry, as Adorno states, is connected to society in many varied and complex ways.