W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden, known more commonly as
W. H. Auden, (
February 21,
1907 –
September 29,
1973) was an
English poet, often cited as one of the most influential of the
20th century. He spent the first part of his life in the
United Kingdom, but emigrated to the
United States in 1939, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1946.
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in
York and spent his early childhood in
Harborne,
Birmingham, where his father Dr George Auden was the school medical officer for Birmingham and
Professor of Public Health at the
University of Birmingham. From the age of eight Auden was sent away to boarding schools, firstly at
St. Edmund's School (Hindhead) in Surrey, and later
Gresham's School in Norfolk, but he returned to Birmingham for the holidays. He was educated at
Christ Church,
Oxford University, but took only a third-class degree. After Oxford he went to live for a year in
Weimar Berlin, in whose tolerant atmosphere his
homosexuality could be more openly expressed.
On returning to Britain, he briefly worked as a tutor in London, then taught at two boys' schools from 1930 to 1935; first for two years at the Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, Scotland, where he wrote most of his 1932 volume in prose and verse
The Orators. Then he taught for three years at the
Downs School, near
Great Malvern, where he was happier than he had been at Larchfield, and where he wrote some of his best-known early poems, including "Out on the lawn I lie in bed" (a poem occasioned by the "Vision of Agape" that he later described in his
1964 preface to the anthology
The Protestant Mystics, ed. by
Anne Fremantle).
After he left the Downs Schol in 1935 he worked mostly a freelancer for the next three years. In 1936 he visited Iceland with his friend Louis MacNeice; in early 1937 he spent about six weeks in Spain observing the Spanish Civil War. A much-reported incident (which seems to have mattered very little in his life) occurred in 1935, when he made a
marriage of convenience to
Erika Mann, lesbian daughter of the great German novelist
Thomas Mann, in order to provide her with a British passport to escape the
Third Reich. (They shook hands after the ceremony and rarely saw each other again, but remained friendly and never bothered to divorce.)
In 1938 Auden and
Christopher Isherwood spent six months traveling to and from China to report on the Sino-Japanese War; they stayed briefly in New York on their way back to Britain, and decided to move to the
United States, which they did in 1939. This move away from Britain, nine months before the start of the
Second World War, was seen by many as a betrayal and his poetic reputation suffered briefly as a result. Soon after arriving in
New York, he gave a public reading with Isherwood and
Louis MacNeice, at which he met the poet
Chester Kallman for the first time. Kallman was to be his lover for a period of two years, but remained his companion for the rest of his life, and the two shared houses and apartments for most of the period from 1953 until Auden's death in 1973, though the relationship was often troubled.
In 1940, Auden returned to the Anglican faith of his childhood when he joined the Episcopal Church of the United States; he was influenced in this reconversion partly through reading
Søren Kierkegaard and
Reinhold Niebuhr. His conversion influenced his work significantly as he explored the
parable and Christian-allegorical readings of Shakespeare's plays. He regarded his sexuality as a sin that he would continue to commit, sometimes alluding to
Augustine's prayer, "Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet." His theology in his later years evolved from a highly inward and psychologically-oriented Protestantism in the early 1940s through a more Catholic-oriented interest in the significance of the body and in collective ritual in the later 1940s and 1950s, and finally to the theology of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in which all belief in a supernatural God was regarded as something that needed to be outgrown in the modern world; Auden memorialized Bonhoeffer in his poem "Friday's Child".
Having spent the war years in the United States, Auden became a
naturalized citizen in 1946, but returned to Europe during the summers starting in 1948, first in
Italy then in
Austria. From 1956 to 1961, Auden was
Professor of Poetry at
Oxford University, a post which required him to give only three lectures each year, so he spent only a few weeks at Oxford during his professorship. During the last year of his life he moved back from New York to Oxford, but again summered in Austria. His last public appearance was a reading at the Palais Palffy in Vienna on 28 September 1973; he died in
Vienna in 1973 later the same night or early the next morning. He was buried near his summer home in
Kirchstetten,
Austria.
Auden wrote a considerable body of criticism and essays as well as co-authoring some drama with his friend
Christopher Isherwood, but he is primarily known as a
poet. Auden's work is characterised by exceptional variety, ranging from such rigorous traditional forms as the
villanelle to original yet intricate forms, as well as the technical and verbal skills Auden displayed regardless of form. He was also partly responsible for re-introducing Anglo-Saxon
accentual meter to English poetry. An area of controversy is the extent to which Auden reworked poems in successive publications, and dropped several of his best-known poems from collected editions because he no longer felt they were honest or accurate. His
literary executor,
Edward Mendelson, makes the case in his introduction to Auden's
Selected Poems that this was in fact an affirmation of Auden's serious belief in the power and importance of poetry. The
Selected Poems include some of the verse Auden rejected, and early versions of some which he later revised.
Auden always saw himself as a northerner and had a lifelong allegiance to the high limestone moorland of the North
Pennines in
Durham,
Northumberland and
Cumbria, in particular the poignant remains of the once-thriving lead mining industry. Auden called it his 'Mutterland' and his 'great good place'. Auden first went north (to
Rookhope, County Durham) in 1919 and the Pennine landscapes excited a
Wordsworthian visionary intensity in the twelve-year-old Wystan.
From 1921 Auden often stayed at his parents' cottage near
Keswick in Cumbria, and some forty of the poems of the 1920s and 1930s and two influential plays
Paid on Both Sides and
The Dog Beneath the Skin are set in the North Pennines. The 1922 epiphany when Auden first became conscious of himself as a creative artist, occurred at Rookhope, when he dropped a stone down a flooded mineshaft.
References to the North Pennine area, and lead mining, occur constantly throughout Auden's later life in both prose and verse, most notably in the poems "New Year Letter" (1940); "The Age of Anxiety" (1947); "Amor Loci" (1965) and "Prologue at Sixty" (1967), wherein he calls himself a "Son of the North", as well as the magazine article, printed in
Vogue in 1954, "England: Six Unexpected Days", a suggested driving itinerary mostly through the Pennine Dales.
Before he turned to
Anglicanism Auden took an active interest in
left-wing political controversies of his day and some of his greatest work reflects these concerns, such as "Spain", a poem on the
Spanish Civil War, and "
September 1, 1939", on the outbreak of
World War II; both were later repudiated by Auden and excluded from his
Collected Poems). Other memorable works include his
Christmas oratorio,
For the Time Being, the poems "
The Unknown Citizen", "
Musée des Beaux-Arts", and poems on the deaths of
William Butler Yeats and
Sigmund Freud. Auden's ironic love poem "
Funeral Blues" (originally a parody written for
The Ascent of F6 with music by
Benjamin Britten and sung by the soprano
Hedli Anderson) was movingly read in the 1994 film
Four Weddings and a Funeral. Before this, Auden's work was famously used in the
GPO Film Unit's
documentary film Night Mail, for which he wrote a verse commentary.
Auden was often thought of as part of a group of like-minded writers including
Edward Upward,
Christopher Isherwood,
Louis MacNeice (with whom he collaborated on
Letters from Iceland in 1936),
Cecil Day-Lewis, and
Stephen Spender, although he himself stopped thinking of himself as part of a group after about the age of 24. He also collaborated closely with composers, writing an
operetta libretto for
Benjamin Britten, and, in collaboration with
Chester Kallman, a libretto for
Igor Stravinsky and two libretti for
Hans Werner Henze. Auden was a frequent correspondent and longtime friend (although they rarely saw each other) of
J.R.R. Tolkien, who died three weeks before Auden. He was among the most prominent early critics to praise
The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter, "I am... very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it."
His 1947 poem "The Age of Anxiety" provided the basis of a
Symphony by
Leonard Bernstein; the symphony includes no vocal music, but the mood and themes of the movements were suggested by the poem.
His poem "Hymn to the United Nations" was commissioned by the
United Nations Secretary-General U Thant who also commissioned a setting for the poem by
Pablo Casals; Casals conducted the first performance in 1971, but the work was never adopted officially by the United Nations.
With Leif Sjöberg Auden translated 66 of the Swedish poet Pär Lagerkvist's poems.
His poem "Victor" served as the basis for a song of the same name on
Rush guitarist
Alex Lifeson's 1996 solo album, also titled
Victor.
*
Poems (1928, privately printed; reprinted 1930)
*
Paid on Both Sides: A Charade (1928, verse play; not published separately)
*
The Orators:An English Study (1932, poetry and prose)
*
The Dance of Death (1933, play)
*
The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935, play, with
Christopher Isherwood)
*
Night Mail (1936, documentary film narrative, not published separately except as a program note)
*
Look, Stranger! (1936, poetry, published in the United States as
On this Island)
*
Letters from Iceland (1936, travelogue, with
Louis MacNeice)
*
The Ascent of F6 (1936, play, with
Christopher Isherwood)
*
Spain (1937, poetry, pamphlet)
*
On the Frontier (1938, play, with
Christopher Isherwood)
*
Journey to a War (1939, travelogue, with
Christopher Isherwood)
*
The Prolific and the Devourer (1939, essays; not published until 1993)
*
Another Time (1940, poetry)
*
Paul Bunyan (1941, libretto for operetta by
Benjamin Britten; not published until 1976)
*
The Double Man (1941, poetry and essays; published in England as
New Year Letter)
*
Three Songs for St. Cecilia's Day (1941, pamphlet with poem written for
Benjamin Britten's 1942 choral piece
Hymn to St. Cecilia; later retitled "Anthem for St. Cecilia's Day: for Benjamin Britten")
*
For the Time Being (1944, two long poems: "The Sea and the Mirror" and "For the Time Being")
*
The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden (1945; includes new poems)
*
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947, poetry; won the 1948
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)
*
The Enchafed Flood (1950, essays)
*
Collected Shorter Poems, 1930-1944 (1950)
*
The Rake's Progress (1951, with
Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by
Igor Stravinsky)
*
Nones (1951, poetry)
*
Mountains (1954, pamphlet poem)
*
The Shield of Achilles (1955, poetry; won the 1956
National Book Award for Poetry)
*
The Magic Flute (1956, with
Chester Kallman, English translation of
Emanuel Schikaneder's original German libretto to the
Mozart opera
Die Zauberflöte)
*
Homage to Clio (1960, poetry)
*
Don Giovanni (1961, with
Chester Kallman, English translation of
Lorenzo da Ponte's original Italian libretto to the
Mozart opera)
*
Elegy for Young Lovers (1961, with
Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by
Hans Werner Henze)
*
The Dyer's Hand (1962, essays)
*
Selected Essays (1964)
*
About the House (1965, poetry)
*
The Bassarids (1961, with
Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by
Hans Werner Henze)
*
Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966)
*
Secondary Worlds (1967, essays)
*
Collected Longer Poems (1969)
*
City Without Walls and Many Other Poems (1969)
*
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970, favorite quotations by others with commentary by Auden)
*
Academic Graffiti (1971)
*
Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems (1972)
*
Forewords and Afterwords (1973, essays)
*
Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (1974; posthumous)
*
Collected Poems (1976, new edition 1991, ed. by
Edward Mendelson)
*
The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939 (1977, ed. by
Edward Mendelson)
*
Selected Poems (1979, ed. by
Edward Mendelson)
*
Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1927-1938 (1989, volume 1 of
The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, ed. by
Edward Mendelson)
*
Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings, 1939-1973 (1993, volume 2 of
The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, ed. by
Edward Mendelson)
*
Tell Me the Truth About Love: Ten Poems (1994, contains fifteen poems in later British editions)
*
Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928 (1994, ed. by [[Katherine Bucknell; expanded edition 2003)
*
As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks, and Other Light Verse (1995)
* Auden: Poems
(1995; Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series)
* Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse: Volume I, 1926-1938 (1997, volume 3 of
The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, ed. by {{Edward Mendelson}})
*
W.H. Auden: Poems Selected By John Fuller (2000)
*
Lectures on Shakespeare (2001, reconstructed and ed. by {{Arthur Kirsch}})
*
Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948 (2002, volume 4 of
The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, ed. by {{Edward Mendelson}})
*
The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (2003, ed. by {{Arthur Kirsch}})
Further Reading* {{Humphrey Carpenter}}.
W. H. Auden: a biography (1981)
* {{Edward Mendelson}}.
Early Auden (1981)
* {{Dorothy J. Farnan}}.
Auden in Love (1985)
* {{Richard Davenport-Hines}}.
Auden (1995)
* {{Thekla Clark}}.
Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (1996)
* {{Edward Mendelson}}.
Later Auden (1999)
* {{Norman Page}}.
Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (2000)
* {{Arthur Kirsch}}.
Auden and Christianity (2005)
*
The W.H. Auden Society*
Auden's Grave*
A biography of Auden*
Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
*
Auden and the North*
BBC audio interviews
