Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh)

Auden, W[ystan] H[ugh] (1907–73), British‐ born poet, educated at Oxford. During the Depression of the 1930s he and other English authors— Spender, Isherwood, and C. Day‐Lewis, among them—were deeply affected by Marxism, an interest that Auden called “more psychological than political.” His works of that period include Poems (1930) and The Orators (1932), prose and poetry, bitter and witty, on the impending collapse of British middle‐class ways and a coming revolution. During this decade he also experimented with lively plays using verse and the vernacular in the vein of Brecht; and after his own The Dance of Death (1933), a verse play, he collaborated with Christopher Isherwood on The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936), a fanciful prose and verse play satirizing the middle class; The Ascent of F6 (1936); and On the Frontier (1938), all with incidental music by Benjamin Britten. His experiences as a traveler during the Spanish Civil War are reflected in the poem Spain (1937); other travels gave rise to Letters from Iceland (1937), verse and prose in collaboration with Louis MacNeice, expressing a holiday mood in temporarily escaping Europe; and Journey to a War (1939), a sad survey of the contemporary situation, issuing out of a voyage to China, with Isherwood's prose balancing Auden's verse. This decade and this period of ideas ended in 1939 with Auden's coming to live in the U.S., confirmed by his naturalization as a citizen in 1946. Although he tried an American theme in Paul Bunyan, a choral operetta written with Benjamin Britten and produced in 1941, his shift in this period was more in views and attitudes than in nationalism. New collections of poetry were Another Time (1940) and The Double Man (1941), a title showing he was cleft in his intense search for a belief or logic, while the English title, New Year Letter, comes from the longest poem in a collection including prose too. Having moved away from the Marxism of the 1930s, he came in the 1940s to the heritage of his Anglo‐Catholic faith and to a Christian existential view. Books included For the Time Being (1945), a Christmas oratorio confronting the present day with a religious view and containing The Sea and the Mirror, a commentary on The Tempest concerned with the relations of art and society; and The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1948, Pulitzer Prize), an ironic idyl, set in a cheap New York bar, on man's isolated condition, intensified in an era without tradition or belief. In 1950 he issued his Collected Shorter Poems, 1930–44, and later lyrics were gathered in Nones (1951), a volume which opened themes that were developed in The Shield of Achilles (1955), Homage to Clio (1960), and About the House (1965), which in their contrast of human qualities and natural forces, and the treatment of the relation of nature to history, displayed great technical skill. In 1968 and 1970 he reassessed respectively the shorter and the longer poems he wished to preserve and issued new editions of them. These volumes were followed by poetry in City Without Walls (1969); Epistle to a Godson (1972); Academic Graffiti (1972), 61 clerihews about famous people; Thank You, Fog (1974), his last lyrics; and Collected Poems (1976), a final selection, often with revisions. His later prose included The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1951), lectures on the Romantics' attitudes toward man, God, and nature; an edition of The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952); Making, Knowing and Judging (1956), his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1956–61); and The Dyer's Hand (1962), a major work collecting lectures, essays, musings, and aphorisms. His final prose works appeared in Secondary Worlds (1968), lectures on poetry, history, and music; A Certain World (1970), extracts with comments from Auden's reading; and Forewords and Afterwords (1973), a collection of minor commentary. In 1972 Auden returned to England to live out his last years at Oxford.