Auden’s Love and Hate for the Poem and for Defecation: "The Geography of the House" Seda Dalgec College

“The Geography of the House” by W. H. Auden is a scatological poem written in a strict form and with a serious tone. The poem resembles the mock-heroic genre of the 18th century in that it deals with a trivial subject matter in a neatly organized and consistent form that sounds almost epic. However, despite the seeming triviality of the content, when we read the poem with a psychoanalytical approach, we uncover a non-commissioned piece of writing about the creative writing process itself, a subject which the poet treats with a touch of cynicism in his commissioned critical works.

The poem consists of nine stanzas made up of eight lines. The fourth and the eighth lines of each stanza rhyme. In contrast to the formal structure of the poem the subject matter is trivial, base, and full of toilet humor. Yet, when we consider Auden the critic, who “like(s) not approve(s) of” the principle “[C]omplicated verse forms of great difficulty...even if their content is trivial” we realize that “The Geography of the House” is the type of a poem which he would like as a critic (Auden, Dyer’s Hand 47). As he suggests in the essay “Reading”, his critical opinions are to be considered as “manifestations of his debate with himself” and the...