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Saying otherwise: speech and allegory in W.H. Auden’s WWII lectures

ABSTRACT By focusing on the work of lecturing – a practice not often considered within literary studies – this essay makes an argument for how Auden’s public speaking during the WWII period impacts and alters his poetry. I show how Auden’s anxieties regarding his proximity to political rhetoric of this period compels him to revise his method of public speech, first by making him shift to lecturing within an academic context, and second by having him turn to the indirect speech that inheres in allegory. Auden incorporates this allegorical mode of speaking, which he develops in his poem, ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, into his lectures for his postwar course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research.