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Maurice Blanchot contends that "[w]e necessarily always write die same thing over again, but die development of what remains the same has infinite richness in its very repetition" (La livre à venir, qtd. in de Man 76). Placing two of Auden's poems, "Death's Echo" and "Danse Macabre," against the background of medieval death lyrics might logically be expected to reveal that the medieval and modern poems tend to converge in terms of some aspects and diverge in terms of others. Given Auden's attachment to medieval poetry, demonstrated on numerous occasions by his "halfconcealed, half-naturalized recollections" (Mendelson 44), the similarities might as well be regarded as yet another proof of his efforts to establish literary continuity. It remains to be seen, however, whether this continuity is a superficial one resting upon his borrowing some of the most popular and expressive elements of the medieval imagery of death, or whether - together with them - Auden also imports the conceptions rooted in medieval modes of thinking. Besides offering an insight into the visual and/or conceptual parallels between the selected works, this comparative /contras five perspective also provides a chance to see the techniques and innovations by which Auden manages to develop the familiar, that is, "the same" (Blanchot5 s phrase), into something "in some way representative of new twentieth-century modes of awareness55 (Baldick 5).
Since no other era in European history is able to pride itself on proving so productive in respect of the representation of deadi as the Middle Ages, a return for inspiration, or merely for information, to medieval forms of expression when deciding to deal with the idea of death in a poem might appear obvious to a poet like Auden, whose early as well as mature works are so profoundly informed by "the unbroken sense of literary tradition55 (Mendelson 42). "His reworkings of saga fragments and his echoes of Old English . . . both in his alliterative metres and his direct quotations from Beowulf, "The Wanderer," "The Battle of Maldon," "Wulf and Eadwacer" (42-43) are "among Auden's adolescent enthusiasms" (Mendelson 44), and they may be regarded as resulting from "the historical nostalgia he inherited from modernism" (43) and as an effort to find "a language to write in" (42). His mature poetry,...