Maudsley Lectures in Psychoanalysis | W.H. Auden: Poetry as a Tool of Psychoanalytic Inquiry - Thomas Karshan

W. H. Auden Through the Looking-Glass: Poetry, Nonsense, and the Unconscious

It has been said that not only is nonsense a type of poetry, but even that all poetry is a kind of nonsense, moving as it does towards away from definite meaning and clear syntax towards ambiguity, contradiction, and illogicality. As such it resembles dreams as Freud described them. In this session, the speaker, Thomas Karshan, will discuss teaching W. H. Auden’s earliest poetry in the context of a final year undergraduate module on nonsense and modern writing at the University of East Anglia. Karshan will establish Auden’s reading of Freud and more heterodox early thinkers on psychology, and Auden’s own analysis, before briefly discussing the inspiration Auden drew from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as well as other poets who promoted linguistic unreason and disorder, especially Arthur Rimbaud and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He will then lead a discussion of two major early Auden poems, which participants may wish to read and reflect on before the session: The Letter and The Watershed. These poems, written in 1927 when Auden was only 20 years old, inaugurated an avant-garde tradition in Anglophone poetry, by their dream-like breaches of syntax, sense, and symbolism. We will work together to think about how the young poet’s experiments with the medium of language open up aspects of consciousness which rational language conceals. What happens when not only nouns, but even conjunctions and prepositions, the mind’s natural connectives, are unmoored? How does that allow Auden to probe his own dream-mind? And, how does it probe our own, as we read these poems? The session will involve the speaker also speaking frankly about the anxiety, as well as enormous pleasure, which he and his students experienced in teaching and studying nonsense together – a pain which led him, ultimately, to stop teaching the course.

Thomas Karshan is Associate Professor at the University of East Anglia, where he teaches courses on consciousness, nonsense, and play, and specialises in creative-critical pedagogy, drawing especially on techniques of imitation, parody, and stylistic and formal metamorphosis. He is author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (2011), editor of Nabokov's Collected Poems, and translator of Nabokov's Tragedy of Mister Morn; and recently has edited On Essays: Montaigne to the Present. He is founder and editor of the creativecritical.net website.

Sam Buchan-Watts is a poet and writer. He is the author of Faber New Poets 15 and Path Through Wood and a monograph, W. S. Graham and Lyric Self-Consciousness. He is working on a non-fiction project about skateboarding and masculinity, which was supported by the Leverhulme Trust through an early career fellowship. He recently led the ‘writing towards well-being’ workshops with the Ben Raemers Foundation.

Series Summary

‘"I must find new words": Dialogues on Poetry and Psychoanalysis’ 

So moved by her experience of being psychoanalysed by Freud, the modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) declared, “I must find new words as the Professor found or coined new words to explain certain as yet unrecorded states of mind or being.” This Summer Series, through lectures and discussions with poets, scholars and analysts, considers various encounters between the cultures of poetry and psychoanalysis, their rich historical dialogues, methods of finding and new coinages. 

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