Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh)

Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907-1973), Anglo-American poet, playwright, and literary critic, regarded by many as the most influential poet in the English language since T. S. Eliot.

Auden was born in York, England, the son of a doctor. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford University, where he studied Natural Science, before changing to studying English. While at Oxford, he became the centre of a group of literary intellectuals that included Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice.

Auden graduated from Oxford University with a third (the lowest pass mark) in 1928: “It is hardly surprising”, he wrote, “if a young poet seldom does well in his examinations...There is nothing a would-be poet knows he has to know. He is at the mercy of the immediate moment...He makes little distinction between a book, a country walk, and a kiss. All are equally experiences to store away in his memory”. He then spent a short time living in Berlin before returning to Britain to work as a schoolmaster in 1929.

Auden's first book, Poems, was published by Faber & Faber in 1930, and was an instant success. The book was Modernist in tone and technique, and was influenced by Auden's wide reading in anthropology and psychoanalysis. During the 1930s he published two further books of poetry, The Orators (1932) and Look, Stranger! (1936), as well as three verse plays with Christopher Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938).

In 1935, at the suggestion of Isherwood, Auden married Erika Mann, daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann, to provide her with a British passport and thus help her escape from Nazi Germany. In 1937 he visited Spain and supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. His poem “Spain” was published as a pamphlet to raise funds for medical aid for Spain. In the same year he was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry, a major honour. Trips to Iceland and China—the first with MacNeice, the second with Isherwood—resulted in two jointly written travel books, Letters from Iceland (1937), and Journey to a War (1939), which combined poetry with prose.

In 1939—to much controversy—Auden moved to the United States. There he met the young poet Chester Kallman, with whom he was to live for the rest of his life. He became an American citizen in 1946 and was active as a poet, reviewer, lecturer, and editor. His early American works, the book-length poems New Year Letter (1941) and For the Time Being (1944), reflect an increasing concern with religion and explore the historical and existential reasons for Christian belief. The Age of Anxiety (1947), a long dramatic poem set in a New York bar, won him the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His numerous other collections of poetry included Nones (1951), The Shield of Achilles (1955), Homage to Clio (1960), About the House (1965), City Without Walls (1969), and Epistle to a Godson (1972), and he also published several works of essays and literary criticism, as well as working on a number of opera librettos with composers including Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinksy. From 1956 to 1961 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in 1972 he returned to Christ Church College. He died in a hotel room in Vienna on September 29, 1973, only hours after having given a poetry reading.

Auden's early work was both a development of and a departure from the “high” Modernism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In the face of high unemployment, the rise of Fascism, and the approach of war, Auden found it hard to maintain a Modernist detachment, and attempted to write a poetry that he hoped would both reflect and help to change the social conditions of the time. He soon came to believe, however, that “poetry makes nothing happen”, and subsequently suppressed or revised some of his earlier, more political work.

Many English writers and critics never forgave Auden for leaving England for America shortly before the outbreak of World War II—it was felt that he was deserting the country at its hour of need—and there was for a long time a consensus among critics that his later work was simple and sentimental in comparison to the complex poetry of the 1930s. In recent years, however, there has been a great revival of interest in his work, with many younger poets responding not only to the seriousness and formal facility of the early poetry but also to the pomp and frivolity of his later collections.

Auden was perhaps the 20th century's greatest verse practitioner, making much use of traditional forms such as the sonnet, the sestina, dramatic narrative, and the elegy, as well as writing many parodies, skits, and much light verse using popular song and ballad forms. The apparent obscurity of his early work can be traced to his frequent omission of definite and indefinite articles, conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositions, and his use of a specialized vocabulary largely drawn from psychoanalysis. The syntax and diction of the later work is more straightforward.

His greatest poems, such as “September 1, 1939”, “In Praise of Limestone”, and “The Fall of Rome”, express a sense of great hopefulness in the face of a hostile world, and a firm belief in the healing powers of art. As he exhorts in the closing stanzas of “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”,