Moral Parable in W. H. Auden's SONNET VIII from JOURNEY TO A WAR

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Funding

I am grateful to the Philosophy and Social Sciences Fund (13YBA428) at Hunan Province, P. R. China for supporting the project of “Moral Poetics of W. H. Auden (before 1941)” from which this article arises.

Notes

1. This sonnet has several versions in its publication history, and the version used in this article is the original one published in Journey to a War in 1939.

2. According to Ronald Langacker, certain elements (or participants) in a conceived situation are made prominent in various ways; among these elements, the most prominent one is called “trajector,” the less prominent one(s) are called “landmark(s);” “expressions can have the same conceptual content but differ in meaning” due to different choices of trajector and landmark(s) (41–43).

3. “Economic man,” a term of classical and neoclassical economics, refers to the theoretical individual, who, motivated by self-interest, attempts to maximize his or her total profit and satisfaction in production, consumption, and leisure, and whose behaviors involve many mathematical calculations, but without any concern for others (Bateman and McAdam 58).

4. Marx's Comments on James Mill (1844) contains the view that “Originally, money has value because it represents products, but in a fully developed money economy the products possess value only because they represent money” (Fraser and Wilde 141). Marx agrees with Aristotle's view—the development of money has led to people's greed, and “individual desires no longer were limited … money became an end in itself;” “exchange perverts human virtue,” turning “‘conscience, honor, etc.’ into commodities ‘capable of being offered for sale by their holders'” (Kain 129).

5. The German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) made a distinction between two conflicting forms of rationality: “formal rationality” and “substantive rationality.” The former aims to promote social orderliness based on “technical” criteria (e.g., profitability, procedures) while the latter does the same based on “value” criteria. Guided by “formal rationality,” what really counts in economic activity is profitability; guided by “substantive rationality,” what matters most in economic activity is its compatibility with moral principles. See Max Weber, “The Social Psychology” 293–294 and Economy and Society 85–86.