W H Auden

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > English Literature, 20th cent. to the Present: Biographies

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.

W. H. Auden (Wystan Hugh Auden) , 1907-73, Anglo-American poet, b. York, England, educated at Oxford. A versatile, vigorous, and technically skilled poet, Auden ranks among the major literary figures of the 20th cent. Often written in everyday language, his poetry ranges in subject matter from politics to modern psychology to Christianity. During the 1930s he was the leader of a left-wing literary group that included Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender . With Isherwood he wrote three verse plays, The Dog beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938), and Journey to a War (1939), a record of their experiences in China. He lived in Germany during the early days of Nazism, and was a stretcher-bearer for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.

Auden's first volume of poetry appeared in 1930. Later volumes include Spain (1937), New Year Letter (1941), For the Time Being, a Christmas Oratorio (1945), The Age of Anxiety (1947; Pulitzer Prize), Nones (1951), The Shield of Achilles (1955), Homage to Clio (1960), About the House (1965), Epistle of a Godson and Other Poems (1972), and Thank You, Fog (1974). His other works include Letters from Iceland (with Louis MacNeice , 1937); the libretto, with his companion Chester Kallman, for Stravinsky 's opera The Rake's Progress (1953); A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970); and The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1968).

In 1939, Auden moved to the United States, he became a citizen in 1946, and beginning that year taught at a number of American colleges and universities. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford. Subsequently he lived in a number of countries, including Italy and Austria, and in 1971 he returned to England. He was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1967.

Bibliography: See his Collected Poetry (1945), Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (1967), and Collected Longer Poems (1969); E. Mendelson, ed., The Complete Works of W. H. Auden (Vol. 1, 1997; Vol. 2, 2002); biographies by C. Osborne (1979, repr. 1995), H. Carpenter (1981), E. Mendelson (2 vol., 1981, 1999), and R. Davenport-Hines (1996) and Auden in Love (1984) by D. Farnan; studies by S. Hynes (1977, repr. 1982) and E. Callan (1983).

Auden, W.H. ( Wystan Hugh) (1907–73) Anglo-American poet, b. England, one of the major poets of the 20th century. Auden's first volume of poetry, Poems (1930), established him as the leading voice in a group of left-wing writers, which included Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Christopher Isherwood. Auden and Isherwood collaborated on a series of plays, such as The Ascent of F6 (1936). Auden joined the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and wrote Spain (1937). In 1939 he emigrated to New York, becoming a US citizen in 1946. His volume The Age of Anxiety (1947) won a Pulitzer Prize. From 1956 to 1961, he was professor of poetry at Oxford University. Auden's poetry adopts many tones, often utilizing colloquial and everyday language. His later poetry is more serious and epistolary, reflecting his conversion to Anglicanism. Auden's Collected Poems was published in 1976.

Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907–73), English poet (later an American citizen) and in his early days a playwright. His first play, The Dance of Death (1935), was produced by the Group Theatre in London in a double bill with T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes. The same company produced the three satirical left-wing verse plays which Auden then wrote in collaboration with the novelist Christopher Isherwood: The Dog beneath the Skin (1935), which has musical choruses; The Ascent of F6 (1936), which describes the symbolic climbing of a mountain in a mixture of prose and poetry, including pop songs; and On the Frontier (1938), with music by Benjamin Britten. Auden also provided the libretti for several operas, and in 1958 prepared a modern verse adaptation of the medieval music-drama The Play of Daniel.

Auden, W. H. (1907–73). Poet, whose name is often given to the literary generation of the 1930s when, it has been said, ‘the red flag was intertwined with the old school tie’. Marx, Freud, and Eliot all influenced Poems (1930). Yet he was as ready to write ‘in praise of limestone’, the Icelandic sagas, or simple human love. Intellectually restless, a brilliant chronicler of the times, in ‘Spain’ (1937) he wrote one of the definitive poems of a ‘low, dishonest decade’. On the eve of war he emigrated. He returned to Oxford in 1955 as professor of poetry.

Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (b York, 1907; d Vienna, 1973). Eng.-born poet (Amer. cit.) and librettist. Wrote lib. for Britten's first opera Paul Bunyan (1941) and, with Chester Kallman, for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951), and Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The Bassarids (1966).