“Revolutionary Changes in Sensibility”: References to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in W. H. Auden’s 1949 Page-Barbour Lectures

Abstract

The article centers on The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea, a series of Page-Barbour Lectures delivered by W. H. Auden at the University of Virginia in 1949, in which he analyzed the Romantic and late nineteenth-century images of the sea, contrasted with images of the desert, giving a partisan interpretation of Melville’s selected prose (Moby-Dick in particular). As his reconsideration of the iconography is underpinned by a political agenda, in this article I comment on Auden’s lectures as exemplifications of a particular, pivotal moment in the development of Melville studies after the 1920s revival.