Deconstructive Reading of W.H. Auden’s In Memory of W. B. Yeats

Abstract

This research studies W.H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ from deconstructive lens. The poem receives a shocking reception because it breaks the traditions of an elegy in glorifying the dead. Yeats, the Irish giant of modern poetry, receives no exalting. Auden not only wastes the opportunity to commemorate Yeats, but he shows the loss of his legacy as a poet. The deconstructive reading of this poem provides another opposite interpretation. The research will present through applying Derrida`s approach the centered and decentered interpretations of the poem which can be read as a glorification of Yeats after the separation between the author and the text is achieved. Usually the poem marginalized the role of Yeats, thus the two oppositions confront each other in this research to reveal the hidden glorification of Yeats though the first reading of the poem tells the opposite.