本文是一篇英语毕业论文，笔者认为作为一个文字和图像的共同体，奥登诗歌中的ekphrasis是诗歌与视觉艺术的互动，是个人经验与他人经验的融合，传达了奥登对世界和人类的普遍理解。绘画、雕塑和电影的视觉艺术作为被观看的对象，体现了人的经验，不能像诗人那样用文字说话，但可以用图像说话。
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Auden and His Poetry
Auden was a productive and fruitful poet who has published more than 400 poems and dozens of collections, receiving wide attention in the literary criticism circle. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1953, the Feltrinelli Prize for Literature in 1957, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1966, and the annual medal of the U.S.A. National Book in 1967. He was acclaimed as “a monster” by Geoffrey Grigson and as “the greatest mind of the twentieth century” by Joseph Brodsky, which the former is a compliment to the complexity and variety of his poetry and the later to the profound thought and his benevolent heart.
Auden’s life and poetry creation process can be divided into two stages with the year 1939 as the boundary. In the first stage, he rose to prominence in the late 1920s, and became hugely popular in the 1930s. Unlike the exhausted and hopeless Europe and the fragmented old government that the writers of the 1920s criticized, Auden, as a writer of the 1930s, was faced with economic crisis, unemployment, and impending war. In 1930, he officially published his first collection Poems in The Criterion edited by T. S. Eliot. Naomi Mitchison praised it very puzzling and exciting and recommended it to more readers. A few critics focused on the obscurity and incoherence of the poems, while most critics showed a positive attitude that they admired Auden’s classicism, detached attitude and distinctive themes, like climbing, exploring, spying and plotting, which tactfully revealed the crux of the age. In September 1935, Auden joined the G.P.O. Film Unit and participated in the production of several films such as Coal Face (1935), Beside the Sea Side (1935), Night Mail (1936), The Way to the Sea (1937), The Londoners (1939), and God’s Chillun (1939) (Fuller, 1998)188. He wrote down some poems and proses for these commentary films. In 1936, Auden’s third collection of poetry Look, Stranger!① was more mature in technique and content. Louis MacNeice observed “it is Mr. Auden who has brought back humanity to English poetry” (Carpenter, 2011)162.
1.2 Literature Review
The complex and changeful life experience, unique and profound thought, coupled with careful and sincere quality, made Auden a creative art of poetry. The ekphrasis in his poetry should be traced to the studies on his poetry which is also an important topic in the research of modern poetry. The research from Britain and America is very rich and diverse, and the research from China mainly focuses on poetry translation, journal articles and dissertations. There is little research related to the ekphrasis in Auden’s poems, which mainly appears scattered in some monographs or journal articles.
In Britain and America, the research on Auden’s poetry has proved fruitful. It can be roughly divided into several types: (1) biography, (2) poetics and artistic style, and (3) thoughts, ideologies and cultural environment. First, biographies are the foundation of the study of the poet. Auden’s literary executor Edward Mendelson’s Early Auden, Later Auden (2017) is an authoritative literature about the study on Auden. This biography is the first-hand information of the study on Auden, providing detailed historical facts and explanations of nearly all his works. Mendelson has shown in great detail how Auden coped with social conflicts and fought against himself, as well as his poetic transformations. Another highly instructive biography is Humphrey Carpenter’s W. H. Auden: A Biography (2011). It tells the growth and transformation of Auden’s life in various stages in chronological order and transmits the characteristics of the era through his individual life, thus connecting the poet’s poetic creation process
