W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February 21, 1907, in York, England, the third son of George Augustus Auden, a physician, and Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden, a trained nurse ^[1]. The family moved to Birmingham in 1908 when his father took up posts as school medical officer and later professor of public health. The household combined science and High Church Anglicanism, two influences that shaped Auden's lifelong habit of framing moral questions in clinical, diagnostic language ^[2].

As a boy he was fascinated by limestone landscapes, abandoned lead mines, and industrial machinery, interests he absorbed during holidays in the Pennines. He later treated that northern mining country as a private sacred geography, returning to it in poems across five decades ^[2]. He attended St Edmund's School in Surrey, where he first met Christopher Isherwood, and then Gresham's School in Norfolk. At Gresham's, at about fifteen, a friend's casual question about whether he wrote poetry set him on his vocation ^[1].

In 1925 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, initially to read natural sciences before switching to English. His tutors found him confident to the point of arrogance, but fellow undergraduates, including Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, recognized his talent early. Spender hand-printed Auden's first small pamphlet of poems in 1928, the year Auden left Oxford with a third-class degree ^[3].

After Oxford, Auden spent roughly nine months in Berlin during 1928 and 1929, an experience that exposed him to Weimar culture, German cabaret, and a sexual freedom unavailable in England ^[1]. He returned to work as a schoolmaster, first at Larchfield Academy in Scotland and then at the Downs School in the Malvern Hills, teaching while writing at a ferocious pace.

T. S. Eliot, then an editor at Faber and Faber, accepted Auden's collection Poems for publication in 1930, and the book announced a startling new voice: clipped, cryptic, drawing on Anglo-Saxon rhythms, psychoanalysis, and the imagery of derelict industry ^[3]. The Orators followed in 1932. By the middle of the decade critics spoke of the Auden Generation, a loose grouping of left-leaning writers including Spender, Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice, with Auden as its acknowledged center ^[2].

The 1930s were extraordinarily productive. He collaborated with Isherwood on three plays for the Group Theatre, among them The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6, and wrote verse commentary for documentary films produced by the GPO Film Unit, most famously Night Mail in 1936 with music by Benjamin Britten ^[4]. Travel books came from journeys to Iceland with MacNeice and to China with Isherwood during the Sino-Japanese War. In 1937 he spent weeks in Spain during the civil war, intending to serve the Republican side; the visit produced the much-debated poem Spain but also began his disillusionment with political commitment as a basis for art ^[2].

Any account of W. H. Auden achievements has to reckon with sheer formal range. He wrote with equal command in villanelles, sestinas, syllabics, ballad meters, and loose alliterative lines modeled on Old English verse. Poems from the late 1930s, including Musee des Beaux Arts, Lullaby, and the elegy In Memory of W. B. Yeats, remain among the most anthologized in the language ^[3]. September 1, 1939, written in New York as Germany invaded Poland, gained renewed public life after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when readers circulated it widely ^[5].

In January 1939 Auden and Isherwood emigrated to the United States, a departure some in Britain treated as desertion on the eve of war. Auden became an American citizen in 1946 ^[1]. The move coincided with a turn toward religious and philosophical subjects. His long works of the 1940s included New Year Letter, For the Time Being (a Christmas oratorio), The Sea and the Mirror (a commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest), and The Age of Anxiety, a baroque eclogue set in a wartime New York bar that won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948 ^[6].

Honors accumulated in his later career: the Bollingen Prize in 1953, the National Book Award in 1956 for The Shield of Achilles, and election as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a post he held from 1956 to 1961 ^[1]. With his partner Chester Kallman he wrote opera librettos, most notably The Rake's Progress for Igor Stravinsky, first performed in Venice in 1951, along with librettos for Hans Werner Henze ^[4]. He was also a prolific essayist and literary historian; the 1962 collection The Dyer's Hand gathered his criticism on subjects from Shakespeare to detective fiction ^[3].

Auden was homosexual, a fact he treated matter-of-factly among friends at a time when it carried legal risk in Britain. In 1935 he nevertheless married Erika Mann, daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann, purely to provide her with a British passport so she could escape Nazi Germany; the two remained legally married but never lived together ^[1].

The central relationship of his life began in New York in 1939, when he met Chester Kallman, a Brooklyn-born poet fourteen years his junior. Their romantic partnership ended within two years, but they remained companions and literary collaborators for the rest of Auden's life, sharing households in New York, on the Italian island of Ischia, and in Austria ^[2].

In 1940 Auden returned to the Anglican Christianity of his childhood, a conversion shaped by his reading of Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Charles Williams. Religion did not make him solemn: friends described a man of rigid daily schedules, chain-smoked cigarettes, strong martinis at fixed hours, carpet slippers worn in public, and a famously creased face he joked about himself ^[2]. He was generous in private, quietly funding friends and strangers, including paying for the education of war orphans ^[1].

From 1948 Auden spent his summers in Europe, first on Ischia and then, from 1958, in a converted farmhouse he bought in Kirchstetten, a village in Lower Austria. Owning a home for the first time delighted him, and the house prompted the poem sequence Thanksgiving for a Habitat ^[2]. Winters he passed in a cluttered apartment on St Mark's Place in Manhattan's East Village.

His later poetry grew more domestic, conversational, and syllabically precise, collected in volumes such as Homage to Clio (1960), About the House (1965), and Epistle to a Godson (1972). Some critics judged the late work a decline from the electric 1930s; others valued its wit and craftsmanship. Auden himself ruthlessly revised his canon, cutting September 1, 1939 and Spain from his collected editions because he came to regard lines in them as dishonest ^[3].

In 1972, feeling isolated in New York, he accepted an offer from Christ Church, Oxford, of a cottage in the college grounds. The return to England proved lonelier than he hoped. On September 28, 1973, he gave a poetry reading in Vienna for the Austrian Society for Literature and died of heart failure in his hotel room during the night, at the age of 66 ^[1]. He was buried in Kirchstetten, where his Austrian neighbors had come to call him simply the Herr Professor ^[2].

Auden's influence on English-language poetry has been broad and durable. Poets as different as Philip Larkin, John Ashbery, Joseph Brodsky, and James Merrill acknowledged debts to him, and Brodsky called him the greatest mind of the twentieth century ^[5]. The Auden Society and the multi-volume Complete Works, edited by his literary executor Edward Mendelson for Princeton University Press, have kept the full range of his writing, including essays, plays, and librettos, in print ^[6].

His reach extends well past the seminar room. The recitation of Funeral Blues (Stop all the clocks) in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral sent a paperback of ten Auden poems onto bestseller lists, introducing him to a mass audience two decades after his death ^[5]. Basic W. H. Auden facts, his birth in York in 1907, the 1939 emigration, the 1948 Pulitzer, only sketch the outline of a career that redefined what a modern poet could sound like.

A memorial stone in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, unveiled in 1974, carries a line from his elegy for Yeats: In the prison of his days, teach the free man how to praise ^[1]. Readers who begin with a short W. H. Auden biography tend to find that the poems themselves, by turns playful, severe, tender, and unnervingly prophetic, remain the best introduction to the man.