“Good landscapes be but lies”: W. H. Auden, the Second World War, and Haunted Places

Many of W. H. Auden’s poems written between 1939 and 1944 explored the Second World War, but only at a distance. After his experience in the Morale Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, however, his poems started to more fully examine the effects of the War. Auden’s grief over the War’s destruction would find voice in poems that are haunted by ghostly figures he encountered. Ruined places contain experience and memory. Auden’s postwar placed-based poems develop his theory of haunted places. There, Auden lived with the dead, and those figures showed him that both sin and love reside in the same space, thus offering hope for the future.