The Enchafèd Flood

The Enchafèd Flood: or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea is a book of three lectures by W. H. Auden, first published in 1950.

The book contains Auden's 1949 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia. The three lectures are titled "The Sea and the Desert", "The Stone and the Shell", and "Ishmael–Don Quixote".

The theme of the book is the sensibility of romanticism, especially in its search for escape from responsibility and community. It deals with poems by Coleridge, Byron, Hopkins, Blake, but above all with Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, which is analysed with psychoanalytical tools (especially used to interpret the main characters of the novel) and with an analogical interpretation of such symbols as the sea, the ship, the stone, and the shell.

The book is dedicated to Alan Ansen. The title comes from a line in Act 2, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's Othello.

• Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (1999)

• The W. H. Auden Society

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W. H. Auden

Books of poetry

• Poems (1930)
• The Orators (1932)
• On This Island (1936)
• Another Time (1940)
• The Double Man (1941)
• For the Time Being (1944)
• The Age of Anxiety (1947)
• Nones (1951)
• The Shield of Achilles (1955)
• Homage to Clio (1960)
• About the House (1966)
• City Without Walls (1969)
• Academic Graffiti (1971)
• Epistle to a Godson (1972)
• Thank You, Fog (1974)

Books containing
prose and verse

• Letters from Iceland (1937, with Louis MacNeice)
• Journey to a War (1939, with Christopher Isherwood)

Prose works
and other books

• The Enchafèd Flood (1950)
• The Dyer's Hand (1962)
• Secondary Worlds (1968)
• A Certain World (1970)
• Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Individual poems

• "The Orators" (1932)
• "Funeral Blues" (1936)
• "Spain" (1937)
• "Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938)
• "Refugee Blues" (1939)
• "September 1, 1939" (1939)
• "The Unknown Citizen" (1939)
• "Hymn to St. Cecilia" (1940)
• "For the Time Being" (1944)
• "The Sea and the Mirror" (1944)
• "The Age of Anxiety" (1947)
• "In Praise of Limestone" (1948)
• "The Platonic Blow" (1948)
• "Horae Canonicae" (1949–55)
• "Bucolics" (1952–53)
• "The Shield of Achilles" (1955)

Plays

• Paid on Both Sides (1928)
• The Dance of Death (1933)
• The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935)
• The Ascent of F6 (1936)
• On the Frontier (1938)
• Play of Daniel (1958)

Libretti

• Paul Bunyan (1941)
• The Rake's Progress (1951)
• Elegy for Young Lovers (1961)
• The Bassarids (1966)
• Love's Labour's Lost (1973)

Screenwriting

• Night Mail (1936)

Family

• George Augustus Auden (father)
• John Bicknell Auden (brother)
• John Auden (first cousin)
• Chester Kallman (companion)

Related

• W. H. Auden bibliography

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