Critical Commentary (Week 3)

This week's critical commentary will focus on the scansion and analysis we did on "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" by W.H. Auden. Taking further note of the use of elegy to get his point across, i took a liking to this poem mainly because of how Auden used the form not to carve a memory of him in the past but as an idea in the present. Most elegy's I've practiced or read were about the past or attempting to "immortalize" the person in their words. I'm debating on whether to call that a technique or just the point he was getting across by referencing three different Yeats, on one hand it could be in that the immortalization was of the present Yeats he was describing or it was just the focus of the poem. Either way, I think this would be a piece that I would aim to springboard off of to try a new way of thinking about the elegy.