W.H. Auden’s Poetry: The Quest for Love (Hardbound - 2004)

W.H. Auden’s Poetry: The Quest for Love is a study of the major twentieth-century British-American poet W.H. Auden’s mutating quest for love in the shifting and interactive Freudian, Marxist and Christian-Kierkegaardian contexts. It focuses on the poems of the most fertile period (1927-47) of Auden’s poetic career. Certain identifiable images are symbolic of the quest for love in each phase, offering an analysis of man in Freudian and Marxist terms. The ameliorative quest for love fulfils itself in the vision of divine love in the final Christian-Kierkegaardian phase.

This ideal and comprehensive book will attract the lovers of Auden and will benefit the scholars, students, teachers and researchers of the 20th century poetry.

Dr. Rakesh Desai is a Reader in the Department of English, South Gujarat University, Surat (Gujarat). His research papers on British, American, Indian English poetry and Indian English fiction have been published. His translations of contemporary British poems, short stories and a film script into Gujarati are to be published soon. He publishes short stories and poems in Gujarati.