Desire to Transcend the Symbolic in W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone”

Authors

  • Inam Ullah Government Degree College No.1, D.I.Khan, KPK, Pakistan.
  • Ahmad Naeem Gomal University, D.I.Khan, KPK, Pakistan
  • Muhammad Mahmood Ahmad Shaheen Government Sadiq Egerton Graduate College, Bahawalpur

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.47067/jlcc.v4i3.113

Keywords:

Desire, Imaginary, Lack, Language, Real, Symbolic, Unconscious

Abstract

H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” presents a beautiful landscape which is enshrouded in heavenly luster,but thisparadisiacal bliss does not last longer, and it vanishes quickly. The loss of paradise is symbolic of what Lacan calls ‘the real’ due to our entry into the symbolic world.In this poem, the narrator being spell bound in the symbolic, loses its contact with the real for which he toils to return. In the material/symbolic world humans mourn throughout their lives because they feel alienated from the real. This paper is an attempt to analyze this poem from Lacanian perspective of desire as to how human beings feelalienated in the world of symbols and expresses their desire to return to the real stage.

Author Biographies

Inam Ullah, Government Degree College No.1, D.I.Khan, KPK, Pakistan.

Lecturer, Department of English

Ahmad Naeem, Gomal University, D.I.Khan, KPK, Pakistan

Lecturer, Department of English Language and Literature

References

Auden, W. H. (1966). Collected Short Poems. London: Faber and Faber.

Coleridge, S. T. (1994). Sameul Taylor Coleridge Selected Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Derrida, J. (1974).The White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy. United States: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Freud, S. (1961).Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: W. W. Norton.

Frost, R. (1923).New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. New York: Henry Holt and Co.

Gottlieb, Y. S. (2003).Regions of Sorrow. California: Stanford University Press.

Homer, S. (2005).Jacques Lacan. New York: Routledge.

Lacan, J. (1966).Ecrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge.

—. (1973). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton.

—. (1990). Television. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson. New York: W. W. Norton.

Mao, D. (2008).Fateful Beauty. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

McDiarmid, L. (1990).Auden's Apologies for Poetry. Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Milton, J. (2005).Paradise Lost. New York: Oxford University Press.

Shaffer, E. S. (1999).Comparative Criticism: Myth and Mythologies. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Tyson, L. (2006).Critical Theory Today. New York: Routledge.

Wordsworth, W. (1998). William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry. Ed. Stephen Gill and Duncan Wu. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Downloads

Published

2022-09-08

How to Cite

Ullah, I. ., Naeem, A. ., & Shaheen, M. M. A. (2022). Desire to Transcend the Symbolic in W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone”. Journal of Languages, Culture and Civilization, 4(3), 293-301. https://doi.org/10.47067/jlcc.v4i3.113