READING AUDEN AS A RESOURCE FOR EXISTENTIAL REFLECTION IN A SOCIETY WITH TECHNOCRATIC AND HEDONISTIC TENDENCIES READING AUDEN AS A RESOURCE FOR EXISTENTIAL REFLECTION IN A SOCIETY WITH TECHNOCRATIC AND HEDONISTIC TENDENCIES

fully know, resonated profoundly with Auden’s own spiritual instincts of faith and doubt, as did Kierkegaard’s consequent exploration of man’s existential relationship with God in his everyday life” [1, p. 23]. In one of his last poems, Thanksgiving , Auden wrote that: “Wild Kierkegaard, Williams and Lewis” [4, p. 316] guided him back to belief. This is also reflected in another passage from Auden’s anthology of Kierkegaard’s works: “Kierkegaard was neither a poet nor a philosopher, but a preacher, an expounder and defender of Christian doctrine and Christian Conduct” [5, p. vii]. Kierkegaard’s legacy helped Auden create his own ideas about The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of a remarkable writer, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 - 1973), who was strongly influenced by the philosophy and thinking of the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, especially by his works Either - Or, The Concept of Anxiety, Works of Love and The Sickness Unto Death. Auden’s poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, purity and religion, and its unique variety in tone, form and content. It is enormously rich in allusions, poetic tone and intel-lectual power. The content of his poems ranges from philosophical meditations, the concept of being, the concept of man, anxiety, aloneness and despair, to the contemporary crises of modern man and the evolution of society. His poetry becomes a resource for existential reflection in modern society with the technocratic and hedonistic tendencies of consumer society of which this paper is an in-depth analysis.


Introduction
Wystan Hugh Auden is one of the greatest and most influential poets of modern times. His verse combines evocative descriptions of his inner world and feelings with personal responses to the major events of the 20th century. At the same time, he is a most inward and subjective poet. Considered individually, his poems are often extremely obscure. They are therefore less 'suited' than those of most modern poets to the kind of critical treatment that begins by considering the poem as an isolated, independent and discrete entity. The odd impersonality of W.H. Auden consistently lends his poetry, even at its deepest insight into the human heart, an air of strangeness. Thus, according to Kirsch (2005), "Auden always insisted on the material, the physical, ultimately all the realities and necessities of man's bodily condition, in human experience, and the proper understanding and acceptance of the flesh and its relation to the spirit" [1, p. 27].
Auden wrote many different kinds of poetry, in highly varied styles and forms. He wrote compressed short stories, plays, biographical and critical essays. He used the traditional genre, sonnet, elegy, eclogue, song, epistle, oratorio, drama and wrote occasional poems on private and public events.

Christian narrativity and symbolism in the poems
After 1939, Auden's literary work was strongly influenced by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, whose writings were introduced to him by Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Nicolas Nabokov and Charles Williams. In Kierkegaard, Auden found what amounted to a theological foundation in his poetry [2]. The Danish philosopher had made careful distinctions between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious modes of existence and Auden implemented these into his own literary work. Auden realized that "faith offers a new horizon of meaning of one's being" [3, p. 159].
For Auden, "Kierkegaard's belief that a man is related in his life to an unconditional absolute that he must continuously search for but never fully know, resonated profoundly with Auden's own spiritual instincts of faith and doubt, as did Kierkegaard's consequent exploration of man's existential relationship with God in his everyday life" [1, p. 23].
In one of his last poems, Thanksgiving, Auden wrote that: "Wild Kierkegaard, Williams and Lewis" [4, p. 316] guided him back to belief. This is also reflected in another passage from Auden's anthology of Kierkegaard's works: "Kierkegaard was neither a poet nor a philosopher, but a preacher, an expounder and defender of Christian doctrine and Christian Conduct" [5, p. vii What we hear here is an echo of the Biblical text from Isaiah 40:6-8: "The voice said, 'Cry out!' And he said, 'What shall I cry?' All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, Because the breath of the Lord blows upon it; Surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever" [10, p. 95].

The Concept of Suffering
In his poems, W. H. Auden also developed a unique concept of suffering. One of his finest pieces is the poem September 1, 1939. The poem was written in 1939, just as German troops invaded Poland and began the Second World War. Auden begins his poem with the speaker sitting in a dive bar in New York City. Hitler's actions have brought the "low dishonest decade" to a close, bringing "the unmentionable odor of death" to the September evening. Auden notes how, despite all imperfections, "we must love one another or die" [4, p. 97]. He was convinced, that to love one another truly is possible only when we start to perceive our neighbor as human being created by God in his own image. He added that loving one's neighbor "is a bodily, blood relationship" [11, p. 297]. Auden also asks: Christianity. This compelled Auden to write more on theological topics. Regarding this matter, he wrote: "There is a faith by which a man lives his life as a man, i.e. the presuppositions he holds in order that 1. he may make sense of his past and present experience; 2. he may be able to act toward the future with a sense that his action will be meaningful and effective; 3. that he and his world may be changed from what they were to something more satisfactory" [6, p. 109]. For Auden, the combination of poetry and faith fulfilled all three important criteria.
American professor of English, Arthur Kirsch, notes that Auden's faith "expanded the horizons of his mind as well as his heart, and his formidable intelligence, in turn, probed the nature and limits of his Christian belief, animating his continuous quest not only to believe still but also to believe again" [1, p. xi]. When leaving Europe, Auden had to make a choice to either leave and save his life, or stay in Europe risking death and facing the imminent horror of Hitler's regime. This reminds us of Kierkegaard's predicament, as Roman Kralik and Luboš Torok point out: "for Kierkegaard the either -or choice is typical" [7, p. 69]. Similar to Kierkegaard, Auden was forced to make a comparable choice. However, Auden's choice was more acutely existential.
Edward Mendelson suggests that: "Kierkegaard's existential Christianity offered two strengths that psychoanalysis and politics could not: it perceived its relation to an absolute value; and it understood that it could never claim to know or embody that value. Auden scarcely needed Kierkegaard's absolute to know that Hitler was in the wrong, but because it obliged him to acknowledge that he too was in the wrong, he could believe its implicit judgment against Hitler more thoroughly than he could believe judgments that gave secret consolations to vanity" [8, p. 130]. Gareth Reeves explains the meaning of Kierkegaard's view of humanity: "Kierkegaard's view of humanity as made up of conscious beings perpetually obliged to exercise their free will to choose from an infinity of foreseeable possibilities, means that each individual presents his unique case" [9, pp. 191].
According to Arthur Kirsch: "By 1938, issues of Christian faith become quite unmistakable in Auden's work" [1, p. 15]. Auden's poem, As I walked out one evening, is very specific. The first part of this ballad describes eternal hopes of romantic love. The second part describes the conquest of such love in terms of Time. In ballad, the lover confesses love to his beloved woman. He stresses that his "love has no endings" [4, p. 66]. However, in the distance, all clocks in the city began to whirr and chime: "O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time" [4, p. 66]. The clock becomes a reminder of uncompromising reality of mortality and of the imperfection of human life. Then the clocks order the people: "You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart" [4, p. 67]. For Auden, it was an "internalization of the biblical injunction, a religious understanding and alleviation of his own sense of isolation and a movement toward the self-forgiveness In a euphoric dream: Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The light must never go out The music must always play" [4, p. 96].
The city represents modern capitalism. Auden outlines "blind skyscrapers" [4, p. 96] that "proclaim the strength of Collective Man" [4, p. 96] via competition and diversity. The ultimate reason for this social blindness is isolationism. People are tied to their average lives; they desire to pursue their happy dreams, and they keep the music playing and the lights on so that they will never see how morally lost they are. They trust the government or the capitalist telling them to remain neutral and unbiased for their own sake, which fits their egoistic and sensual desires to fulfill their selfish goals without regard for what is happening in Europe.
Auden developed in his poems a unique concept of suffering. One of his masterpieces, the poem Musée des Beaux Arts, depicts the human position of suffering in the "dispassionate landscape of the daily life of man as well as of nature" [1, p. 18]. It is the only poem that Auden based on a specific painting. The painting concerned was Brueghel's picture The Fall of Icarus. "The poem, in its brisk survey of quotidian life, in the midst of which astonishing events take place" [16, p. 99]: "About suffering they were never wrong. The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position, how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along" [4, p. 87]. The second stanza of the poem reflects Auden's focus on Brueghel's painting of the fall of Icarus. In Christian narration, Icarus is a figure often interpreted as a type of Christ. Auden describes: "In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure, the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on" [4, p. 87].
The moral message of this poem concerns human indifference, which is a manifestation of the moral failure and refusal to love one's neighbor. Just in refusing to love one's neighbor Auden sees a fundamental violation of the Christian faith and considers it a serious sin. The poem also presents another interpretative dimension. "Both stanzas of Musée des Beaux Arts derive their power from the juxtaposition of momentous suffering with the unconcerned lives of ordinary people" [1, p. 20]. The poem has enjoyed "an unusual popularity, and this may well be due to the "Our bodies cannot love: But without one, What works of Love could we do?" [12, p. 713 Auden argues that during war-time "everybody is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person" [14, p. 3]. Issues pertaining to displaced individuals and communities have always been complex and difficult to deal with. American scholar Hubert Jurjewicz in his paper titled Mechanisms through which spirituality leads to resilience for immigrants highlights the complicated life of immigrants and points out different problems connected with immigration: "Mechanisms through which spirituality leads to resilience for immigrants -short scheme: 1. Spirituality -problems encountered by immigrants: racism, lack of money, no family ties, culture shock, food & basic necessities and fear of deportation. 2. Mechanisms -healing mental injury, strengthening personal relationships, reducing anxiety & depression, maintaining a positive outlook, accepting change as part of life and changing attitudes towards problems. 3. Resilience -some problems persist, but individuals are 'used' to them. They resume relative normality in spite of the hitherto existing challenges" [15, p. 24].
For a better understanding of Auden, it is important to note that in the first stanza of his poem, the term "alone" clearly presents the conflict between the individual and the state and the individual's moral responsibility. In the fourth stanza the poet focuses on New York City, where he settled after his arrival from Europe.
"Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long a unique concept of love. Auden developed this concept in one of his most admired, quoted and anthologized poems, which he was eventually to title his poem Lay Your Sleeping Head My Love. According to Hecht, in this poem Auden "made at least one change in the course of time: in the last line of the second stanza, which originally went 'The hermit's sensual ecstasy,' the word 'sensual' was changed to 'carnal.' Within the wide spectrum of love, including love as mysteriously curative of both individual and social ills, the love described here is vulnerable, touching, and decently screened as regards gender" [ Auden's poem Alone is another philosophical meditation on love. The poem analyzes the difference between the aching that is linked to being the subject of someone's love and being alone. Are we, human beings really alone? What is the essence of human relationships? Auden suggests the metaphysical presence of God in the life of each human by highlighting that we are never alone.
"Each lover has some theory of his own About the difference between the ache Of being with his love, and being alone: Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone That really stirs the senses, when awake, Appears a simulacrum of his own. Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown; He cannot join his image in the lake So long as he assumes he is alone. The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone, Are always up to mischief, though, and take The universe for granted as their own. The elderly, like Proust, are always prone To think of love as a subjective fake; The more they love, the more they feel alone. Whatever view we hold, it must be shown Why every lover has a wish to make Some kind of otherness his own: Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone" [19, p. 312].

Conclusion
Auden's existential poems reflect a moral, spiritual and imaginative approach towards life. All his authorship highlights love and warns against the human cruelty that comes from war. way in which the mythic or miraculous subject of the painting is subdued and domesticated to our habitual and quotidian experience" [16, p. 100].
Another poem by Auden which reflects suffering is Refugee Blues. This poem laments the plight of the Jews who were forced to escape from Europe when the Holocaust started and Jews were killed or imprisoned under the cruel regime of Hitler which sentenced them all to death. The narrator of the poem thinks that he heard the rumbling of an imminent storm, but finally, it was Hitler sentencing all Jews to death: "I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky, it was Hitler over Europe, saying: 'They must die'" [4, p. 92

The Concept of Love
Auden's poetry was also affected by a very unusual mystical experience of Agape. He highlights a formative, mystical episode which he experienced one summer night in 1933 while he was spending pleasant time with some colleagues: "I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly, because thanks to the power, I was doing it-what it means to love one's neighbor as oneself. My personal feelings towards them were unchanged-they were still colleagues, not intimate friends-but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it" [16, p. 69-70].
Auden later describes this feeling as a vision of 'Agape,' or a kind of brotherly love. He perceived them as sexless human beings and encountered absolutely pure love. Because of this experience he aligned his faith with the moral, human imperative to love one's neighbor as one's self.
Auden's view of romantic love, however, is not only an expression of his personal temperament, but in turn reflects his religious attitude: Auden always honored and respected the state of marriage. He emphasized that: "Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate" [17, p. 248].
Every image Auden invokes signifies a symptomatic condition of society or individual psychology. His poetry also reflects a spiritual guide for the individual modern man when faced with the problems of life in a society marked by hedonistic and technocratic tendencies. "The path to an authentic subjectivity seems to lead inevitably through the complicated and sometimes painful struggles of life. One should not expect to make sense of his own life without an arduous struggle to interpret one's existence in relation to self, the world, and to God. The power and wisdom of such interpretation […] comes from God as the source, guide, and goal of the journey" [20, p. 106].
Our contemporary society is more or less consumer oriented. Reading Auden can morally and spiritually enrich each reader, cultivating in him a sense of longing for a deeper meaning of life. Auden's legacy remains very appropriate for current modern society. After his emigration to the United States, Auden's poems reflect powerful Christian narration and religious symbolism. Auden "was a great poet and critic, but he should also be remembered, and would have wished to be remembered, as a man who sought to lead a Christian life" [1, p. 179]. Auden's concepts of love, aloneness and suffering can play the role of