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Abstract

This thesis investigates the relationship between the vertical space, the poetic forms, and the revolutionary ideas in W. H. Auden’s and Eugene Jolas’s aeronautical writings in the interwar period. The air assumed unique metaphorical significance after WWI: the apocalyptic vision of airstrikes made the air an augury for danger, but apart from military implications, the spirituality of vertical ascension still attracted Neo-romantic authors to restore the mythological power to the air. The poetic perspective from the air, “the hawk’s vision,” also became problematic, since it translated not merely into the social concerns of the airminded intelligentsia, but the elitist and individualist detachment from the earthbound masses. I argue that such internal polysemy of the aeronautical tropes enabled interwar poets to incorporate their social and political leanings into their imaginative engagement with the air. In the second book of The Orators – “Journal of an Airman,” Auden shapes the protagonist as a neurotic pro-fascist revolutionary, and creates a “verbal anarchy” through the juxtaposition of multiple linguistic and literary forms. Jolas, on the other hand, envisions the messianic refiguration of human society in a series of aerial fantasies, which relies on the revolution of language through techniques like neologism and polyglotism. This thesis follows the New Formalist approach to these formal designs and considers them as of a political nature. The first chapter probes into the forms of obscurity and esotericism in Auden’s “Journal,” reading his linguistic chaos as the symptom of his ideological vacillation and political probabilism. The second chapter introduces the formal features of Jolas’s cosmopoetics as a curative scheme in response to the defeatist depiction of the sky as Auden’s. The third chapter inspects the idea of revolution in these formal experiments and reveals three underlying pairs of binary structures as the genuine meaning-making mechanism, namely the dialectics between collectivity and individuality, artistic leadership and social spontaneity, and ascent and descent.