Auden’s creative collision with Kierkegaard
[Audenova tvoriva kolizia s Kierkegaardom]
Martina Pavlikova – Tibor Mahrik
DOI: 10.18355/XL.2020.13.03.12
Abstract
Interpretation of any authors' works is one of the permanent challenges of any researchers and experts in the field of their literary research work. The metaphor of collision represents in our conception here the interaction of two subjects or rather two exceptional writers and poets of their time - Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Through our research, we followed which way Auden understood Kierkegaard, how he has been inspired by him and in what scope he interpreted his works in a relevant way, and finally, how his interpretation deviates from Kierkegaard. Our understanding of this matter and key propositions we compare with the contemporary research as well as the scholarly discourse on Kierkegaard. The aim of the study is to expose and critically reflect upon the work of Auden against examples of his selected poetry and to identify the common penetration and overlap of both authors as well as to point out some fields in which they differ from each other. In order to get to the point, we present three areas of Auden's inner world of thinking in relation to Kierkegaard, i. e. we are to focus upon:
1) the logic of dialectics as an interpretation of the inner direction of man from his potentiality to the actuality,
2) philosophical perception of the relationship between reality and abstraction,
3) the religious dimension of the existence of individual as a sensitive parameter in relation to the hermeneutics of the interpretation of the work of both authors.
In the study, we present findings that indicate Auden's reductionism with respect to the interpretation of the breadth and depth of thought wealth left by Kierkegaard, whom Auden has repeatedly associated to throughout his life as it has been poetically embraced and materialized across his writing corpus. However, the investigation of the reductionism causes and wider context of Auden's interpretative misunderstanding is not at the target of the study.
Key words: interpretation, leap, abstraction, faith, poetry
Pages: 145 - 156
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