W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden (1907-1973) in 1939. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

W.H. Auden
Born	February 21 1907(1907-Template:MONTHNUMBER-21) York, England
Died	September 29 1973(1973-Template:MONTHNUMBER-29) (aged 66) Vienna, Austria
Nationality	English
Citizenship	American from 1946
Education	M.A. English language and literature
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford
Occupation	Poet
Relatives	George Augustus Auden (father), Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden (mother), George Bernard Auden (brother), John Bicknell Auden (brother)

Wystan Hugh Auden 21 February 1907 - 29 September 1973) was an Anglo-American poet (born in England, later an American citizen), regarded by many as among the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Life

Overview

Auden wrote a considerable body of literary 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 characterized by exceptional variety, ranging from such rigorous traditional forms as the villanelle to entirely unstructured verse, as well as the technical and verbal skills Auden displayed regardless of form. He was also partly responsible for re-introducing Anglo-Saxon Accentual verse to English poetry.

The Addictions of Sin W.H. Auden in His Own Words

Childhood

Auden was born in York, England, to George Augustus Auden, a physician, and Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden, who had trained (but never served) as a missionary nurse. He was the 3rd of 3 children, all sons; the eldest, George Bernard Auden, became a farmer, while the 2nd, John Bicknell Auden, became a geologist.

Auden's grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen; he grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household which followed a "High" form of Anglicanism with doctrine and ritual resembling those of Roman Catholicism. He traced his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood. He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas is visible throughout his work.

In 1908 his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health; Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. From the age of 8 he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays. His visits to the Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining industry figure in many of his poems; the remote decaying mining village of Rookhope was for him a "sacred landscape", evoked in a late poem, "Amor Loci." Until he was 15 he expected to become a mining engineer, but his passion for words had already begun. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do."

Education

Auden's first boarding school was St. Edmund's School, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later famous in his own right as a novelist. At 13 he went to Gresham's School inNorfolk; there, in 1922, when his friend Robert Medley asked him if he wrote poetry, Auden 1st realized his vocation was to be a poet. Soon after, he "discover(ed) that he (had) lost his faith" (through a gradual realisation that he had lost interest in religion, not through any decisive change of views). In school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922, and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his last year at Gresham's. His first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923. Auden later wrote a chapter on Gresham's for Graham Greene's The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (1934).

In 1925 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology, but he switched to English by his second year. Friends he met at Oxford included Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender; these 4 were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a 3rd-class degree.

He was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925; for the next few years Isherwood was his literary mentor to whom he sent poems for comments and criticism. Auden probably fell in love with Isherwood and in the 1930s they maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others. In 1935-1939 they collaborated on 3 plays and a travel book.

From his Oxford years onward, his friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident and shy except when certain of his welcome. He was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while choosing to live amidst physical disorder.

1928-1938

In the autumn of 1928 Auden left Britain for 9 months in Berlin, partly to rebel against English repressiveness. In Berlin, he said, he first experienced the political and economic unrest that became a central subjects for him.

On returning to Britain in 1929, he worked briefly as a tutor. In 1930 his first published book, Poems (1930), was accepted by T. S. Eliot for Faber & Faber; the firm also published all his later books. In 1930 he began 5 years as a schoolmaster in boys' schools: 2 years at the Larchfield Academy, in Helensburgh, Scotland, then 3 years at The Downs School, in the Malvern Hills, where he was a much-loved teacher. At the Downs, in June 1933, he experienced what he later described as a "Vision of Agape," when, while sitting with 3 fellow-teachers at the school, he suddenly found that he loved them for themselves, that their existence had infinite value for him; this experience, he said, later influenced his decision to return to the Anglican Church in 1940.

During these years, Auden's erotic interests focused, as he later said, on an idealized "Alter Ego" rather than on individual persons. His relations (and his unsuccessful courtships) tended to be unequal either in age or intelligence; his sexual relations were transient, although some evolved into long friendships. He contrasted these relations with what he later regarded as the "marriage" (his word) of equals that he began with Chester Kallman in 1939 (see below), based on the unique individuality of both partners.

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From the G.P.O. Film Unit's Night Mail; scene possibly directed by Auden

From 1935 until he left Britain early in 1939, Auden worked as freelance reviewer, essayist, and lecturer, first with the G.P.O. Film Unit, a documentary film-making branch of the post office, headed by John Grierson. Through his work for the Film Unit in 1935 he met and collaborated with Benjamin Britten, with whom he also worked on plays, song cycles, and a libretto. Auden's plays in the 1930s were performed by the Group Theatre, in productions that he supervised to varying degrees.

His work now reflected his belief that any good artist must be "more than a bit of a reporting journalist." In 1936 he spent 3 months in Iceland, where he gathered material for a travel book Letters from Iceland (1937), written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice. In 1937 he went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but was put to work broadcasting propaganda, a job he left in order to visit the front. His seven-week visit to Spain affected him deeply, and his social views grew more complex as he found political realities to be more ambiguous and troubling than he had imagined. Again attempting to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent 6 months in 1938 visiting the Sino-Japanese War, working on their book Journey to a War (1939). On their way back to England they stayed briefly in New York and decided to move to the United States. Auden spent the autumn of 1938 partly in England, partly in Brussels.

Many of his poems during the 1930s and afterward were inspired by unconsummated love, and in the 1950s he summarized his emotional life in a famous couplet: "If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me" ("The More Loving One"). He had a gift for friendship and, starting in the late 1930s, a strong wish for the stability of marriage; in a letter to his friend James Stern he called marriage "the only subject." Throughout his life, he performed charitable acts, sometimes in public (as in his marriage of convenience to Erika Mann in 1935 that gave her a British passport with which to escape the Nazis), but, especially in later years, more often in private, and he was embarrassed if they were publicly revealed, as when his gift to his friend Dorothy Day for the Catholic Worker movement was reported on the front page of The New York Times in 1956.

1939-1973

Chester Kallman and Auden. Courtesy Jewish Currents.

Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York in January 1939, entering on temporary visas. Their departure from Britain was later seen by many there as a betrayal and Auden's reputation suffered. In April 1939 Isherwood moved to California, and he and Auden saw each other only intermittently in later years. Around that time, Auden met poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next 2 years (Auden described their relation as a "marriage" that began with a cross-country "honeymoon" journey). In 1941 Kallman ended their sexual relations because he could not accept Auden's insistence on a mutual faithful relationship, but he and Auden remained companions for the rest of Auden's life, sharing houses and apartments from 1953 until Auden's death. Auden dedicated both editions of his collected poetry (1945/50 and 1966) to Isherwood and Kallman.

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Christopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden (right) photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 6 February 1939

In 1940-41, Auden lived in a house in Brooklyn Heights which he shared with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others, and which became a famous center of artistic life. In 1940, he joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at thirteen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams, whom he had met in 1937, partly by reading Soren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life.

After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939 Auden told the British embassy in Washington that he would return to the UK if needed, but was told that, among those his age (32), only qualified personnel were needed. In 1941-1942 he taught English at the University of Michigan. He was called up to be drafted in the United States Army in August 1942, but was rejected on medical grounds. He had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1942-43, but did not use it, choosing instead to teach at Swarthmore College in 1942-1945.

In the summer of 1945, after the end of World War II in Europe, he was in Germany with the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, studying the effects of Allied bombing on German morale, an experience that affected his postwar work as his visit to Spain had affected him earlier. On his return, he settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer, and as a lecturer at The New School for Social Research and a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American colleges. In 1946 he became a naturalized citizen of the US.

His theology in his later years evolved from a highly inward and psychologically oriented Protestantism in the early 1940s to a more Roman 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 which rejected "childish" conceptions of God for an adult religion that focused on the significance of human suffering.

Auden began summering in Europe in 1948, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house, then, starting 1958, in Kirchstetten, Austria where he bought a farmhouse, and, he said, shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first time.

In 1951, shortly before British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the USSR, Burgess attempted to phone Auden to arrange a vacation visit to Ischia that he had earlier discussed with Auden; Auden never returned the call and had no further contact with either spy, but a media frenzy ensued in which his name was mistakenly associated with their escape. The frenzy was repeated when the MI5 documents on the incident were released in 2007.

In 1956-1961, Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University where he was required to give t3 lectures each year. This fairly light workload allowed him to continue to winter in New York, where he now lived on St. Mark's Place, and to summer in Europe, spending only 3 weeks each year lecturing in Oxford. He now earned his income mostly by readings and lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker and other magazines.

During his last years, his conversation became repetitive, to the disappointment of friends who had known him earlier as a witty and wide-ranging conversationalist. In 1972, he moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage, but he continued to summer in Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973 and was buried in Kirchstetten.

Writing

His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Overview

Auden published about 400 poems, including 7 long poems (2 of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song cliches to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.

He also wrote more than 400 essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . . . than any sexual relations I have had."

Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views that he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective. His rejected poems include "Spain" and "September 1, 1939". His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Auden's Selected Poems that Auden's practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it. (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and early texts of poems that he revised.)

Early work

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Cover of the privately-printed Poems (1928)

1922-1930

Auden began writing poems at 13, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas Hardy. At 18 he discovered T. S. Eliot and adopted an extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his own voice at 20, when he wrote the earliest poem later included in his collected work, "From the very first coming down." This and other poems of the late 1920s tended to be in a clipped, elusive style that alluded to, but did not directly state, their themes of loneliness and loss. Twenty of these poems appeared in his first book Poems (1928), a pamphlet hand-printed by Stephen Spender.

In 1928 he wrote his 1st dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides, subtitled "A Charade," which combined style and content from the Icelandic sagas with jokes from English school life. This mixture of tragedy and farce, with a dream play-within-the-play, introduced the mixed styles and content of much of his later work. This drama and 30 short poems appeared in his first published book Poems (1930, 2nd edition with 7 poems replaced, 1933); the poems in the book were mostly lyrical and gnomic mediations on hoped-for or unconsummated love and on themes of personal, social, and seasonal renewal; among these poems were "It was Easter as I walked," "Doom is dark," "Sir, no man's enemy," and "This lunar beauty."

A recurrent theme in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts", Auden's term for the powerful, unseen psychological effects of preceding generations on any individual life (and the title of a poem). A parallel theme, present throughout his work, is the contrast between biological evolution (unchosen and involuntary) and the psychological evolution of cultures and individuals (voluntary and deliberate even in its subconscious aspects).

1931-1935

Auden's next large-scale work was The Orators: An English study (1932; revised editions, 1934, 1966), in verse and prose, largely about hero-worship in personal and political life. In his shorter poems, his style became more open and accessible, and the exuberant "Six Odes" in The Orators reflect his new interest in Robert Burns. During the next few years, many of his poems took their form and style from traditional ballads and popular songs, and also from expansive classical forms like the Odes of Horace, which he seems to have discovered through the German poet Holderlin. Around this time his main influences were Dante, William Langland, and Alexander Pope.

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Programme of a Group Theatre production of The Dance of Death, with unsigned synopsis by Auden

During these years, much of his work expressed left-wing views, and he became widely known as a political poet, although his work was more politically ambivalent than many reviewers recognized. He generally wrote about revolutionary change in terms of a "change of heart", a transformation of a society from a closed-off psychology of fear to an open psychology of love. His verse drama The Dance of Death (1933) was a political extravaganza in the style of a theatrical revue, which Auden later called "a nihilistic leg-pull." His next play The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), written in collaboration with Isherwood, was similarly a quasi-Marxist updating of Gilbert and Sullivan in which the general idea of social transformation was more prominent than any specific political action or structure.

The Ascent of F6 (1937), another play written with Isherwood, was partly an anti-imperialist satire, partly (in the character of the self-destroying climber Michael Ransom) an examination of Auden's own motives in taking on a public role as a political poet. This play included the first version of "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), written as a satiric eulogy for a politician; Auden later rewrote the poem as a "Cabaret Song" about lost love (written to be sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson for whom he wrote many lyrics in the 1930s). In 1935, he worked briefly on documentary films with the G.P.O. Film Unit, writing his famous verse commentary for Night Mail and lyrics for other films that were among his attempts in the 1930s to create a widely-accessible, socially-conscious art.) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood).

1936-1939

These tendencies in style and content culminate in his collection Look, Stranger! (1936; his British publisher chose the title, which Auden hated; Auden retitled the 1937 US edition On This Island). This book included political odes, love poems, comic songs, meditative lyrics, and a variety of intellectually intense but emotionally accessible verse. Among the poems included in the book, connected by themes of personal, social, and evolutionary change and of the possibilities and problems of personal love, were "Hearing of harvests", "Out on the lawn I lie in bed", "O what is that sound", "Look, stranger, on this island now" (later revised versions change "on" to "at"), and "Our hunting fathers."

Auden was now arguing that an artist should be a kind of journalist, and he put this view into practice in Letters from Iceland (1937) a travel book in prose and verse written with Louis MacNeice, which included his long social, literary, and autobiographical commentary "Letter to Lord Byron." (dedicated to George Augustus Auden). In 1937, after observing the Spanish Civil War he wrote a politically-engaged pamphlet poem Spain (1937); he later discarded it from his collected works. Journey to a War (1939) a travel book in prose and verse, was written with Isherwood after their visit to the Sino-Japanese War. Auden's last collaboration with Isherwood was their third play, On the Frontier, an anti-war satire written in Broadway and West End styles.

Auden's themes in his shorter poems now included the fragility and transience of personal love ("Danse Macabre", "The Dream", "Lay your sleeping head"), a theme he treated with ironic wit in his "Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson" (which included "O Tell Me the Truth About Love" and the revised version of "Funeral Blues"), and also the corrupting effect of public and official culture on individual lives ("Casino", "School Children", "Dover"). In 1938 he wrote a series of dark, ironic ballads about individual failure ("Miss Gee", "James Honeyman", "Victor"). All these appeared in his next book of verse, Another Time (1940), together with other famous poems such as "Dover", "As He Is", and "Musee des Beaux Arts" (all written before he moved to America in 1939), and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "The Unknown Citizen", "Law Like Love", "September 1, 1939", and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (written in America). The elegies for Yeats and Freud are partly statements of Auden's anti-heroic theme, in which great deeds are performed, not by unique geniuses whom others cannot hope to imitate, but by otherwise ordinary individuals who were "silly like us" (Yeats) or of whom it could be said "he wasn't clever at all" (Freud), and who became teachers of others, not awe-inspiring heroes.

Middle period

1940-1946

In 1940 Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year Letter", which appeared with miscellaneous notes and other poems in The Double Man (1941). At the time of his return to the Anglican Communion he began writing abstract verse on theological themes, such as "Canzone" and "Kairos and Logos." Around 1942, as he became more comfortable with religious themes, his verse became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly used the syllabic verse he learned from the poetry of Marianne Moore.

His recurring themes in this period included the artist's temptation to use other persons as material for his art rather than valuing them for themselves ("Prospero to Ariel") and the corresponding moral obligation to make and keep commitments while recognizing the temptation to break them ("In Sickness and Health"). From 1942 through 1947 he worked mostly on 3 long poems in dramatic form, each differing from the others in form and content: "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest" (both published in For the Time Being, 1944), and The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (published separately 1947). The first two, with Auden's other new poems from 1940-1944, were included in his 1st collected edition, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), with most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions.

1947-1957

After completing The Age of Anxiety in 1946 he focused again on shorter poems, notably "A Walk After Dark," "The Love Feast", and "The Fall of Rome." Many of these evoked the Italian village where he summered in 1948-57, and his next book, Nones (1951), had a Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work. A new theme was the "sacred importance" of the human body in its ordinary aspect (breathing, sleeping, eating) and the continuity with nature that the body made possible (in contrast to the division between humanity and nature that he had emphasized in the 1930s); his poems on these themes included "In Praise of Limestone" and "Memorial for the City." In 1949 Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, and later collaborated on 2 libretti for operas by Hans Werner Henze.

Auden's earliest separate prose book was The Enchafed Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1950), based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature.

Between 1949 and 1954 he worked on a sequence of 7 Good Friday poems, "Horae Canonicae", an encyclopedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history, focused on the irreversible act of murder; the poem was also a study in cyclical and linear ideas of time. While writing this, he also wrote a sequence of 7 poems about man's relation to nature, "Bucolics." Both sequences appeared in his next book, The Shield of Achilles (1955), with other short poems, including the book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier."

Extending the themes of "Horae Canonicae", in 1955-56 he wrote a group of poems about "history," the term he used to mean the set of unique events made by human choices, as opposed to "nature," the set of involuntary events created by natural processes, statistics, and anonymous forces such as crowds. These poems included "T the Great", "The Maker", and the title poem of his next collection Homage to Clio (1960).

1958-1973

In the late 1950s Auden's style became less rhetorical while its range of styles increased. In 1958, having moved his summer home from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno"; other poems from this period include "Dichtung und Wahrheit: An Unwritten Poem", a prose poem about the relation between love and personal and poetic language, and the contrasting "Dame Kind", about the anonymous impersonal reproductive instinct. These and other poems, including his 1955-66 poems about history, appeared in Homage to Clio (1960).

His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956-61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s.

While translating the haiku and other verse in Dag Hammarskjold's Markings, Auden began using haiku for many of his poems. A sequence of fifteen poems about his house in Austria, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat", appeared in About the House (1965), with other poems that included his reflections on his lecture tours, "On the Circuit." In the late 1960s he wrote some of his most vigorous poems, including "River Profile" and 2 poems that looked back over his life, "Prologue at Sixty" and "Forty Years On." All these appeared in City Without Walls (1969). His lifelong passion for Icelandic legend culminated in his verse translation of The Elder Edda (1969).

He was commissioned in 1963 to write lyrics for the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, but the producer rejected them as insufficiently romantic. In 1971 Secretary-General of the United Nations U Thant commissioned Auden to write the words, and Pablo Casals to compose the music, for a "Hymn to the United Nations", but the work had no official status.

A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) was a kind of self-portrait made up of favorite quotations with commentary, arranged in alphabetical order by subject. His last prose book was a selection of essays and reviews, Forewords and Afterwords (1973). His last books of verse, Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the unfinished Thank You, Fog (published posthumously, 1974) include reflective poems about language ("Natural Linguistics") and about his own aging ("A New Year Greeting", "Talking to Myself", "A Lullaby" ["The din of work is subdued"]). His last completed poem, in haiku form, was "Archeology", about ritual and timelessness, 2 recurring themes in his later years.

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W. H. Auden, 1970

Critical reputation

Auden's stature in modern literature has been disputed, with opinions ranging from that of Hugh MacDiarmid, who called him "a complete wash-out", to the obituarist in The Times (London), who wrote: "W.H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry . . . emerges as its undisputed master."

In his enfant terrible stage in the 1930s he was both praised and dismissed as a progressive and accessible voice, in contrast to the politically nostalgic and poetically obscure voice of T.S. Eliot. His departure for America in 1939 was hotly debated in Britain (once even in Parliament), with some critics treating it as a betrayal, and the role of influential young poet passed to Dylan Thomas, although defenders such as Geoffrey Grigson, in an introduction to a 1949 anthology of modern poetry, wrote that Auden "arches over all." His stature was suggested by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes (1972).

In the U.S., starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden's regular stanzas set the style for a whole generation of poets; John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s Auden "was the modern poet." His manner was so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Beat Generation was partly a reaction against his influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, some writers (notably Philip Larkin and Randall Jarrell) lamented that Auden's work had declined from its earlier promise.

By the time of Auden's death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman. The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that "by the time of Eliot's death in 1965 ... a convincing case could be made for the assertion that Auden was indeed Eliot's successor, as Eliot had inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats died in 1939." With some exceptions, British critics tended to treat his early work as his best, while American critics tended to favor his middle and later work. Unlike other modern poets, his reputation did not decline after his death, and Joseph Brodsky wrote that his was "the greatest mind of the twentieth century."

Recognition

Lullaby. A poem by W.H. Auden. Performed by Beag Horn

Auden is commemorated by a memorial stone in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, unveiled in 1974.

In popular culture

Auden's popularity and familiarity suddenly increased after his "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") was read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994); subsequently, a pamphlet edition of 10 of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold more than 275,000 copies. After 11 September 2001, his poem "September 1, 1939" was widely circulated and frequently broadcast. Public readings and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in 2007 marked his centenary year.

Publications

Poetry

• Poems. hand printed by Stephen Spender, 1928; London: Faber, 1930; New York: Random House, 1934
  • revised edition, Faber, 1960; revised (with foreword by Stephen Spender), Elliston Poetry Foundation of the University of Cincinnati, 1965.
• The Orators: An English Study (includes prose). London: Faber, 1932
  • revised edition (with new foreword). New York: Random House, 1967.
• Look, Stranger!. London: Faber, 1936
  • published in U.S. as On This Island. New York: Random House, 1937.
• Letters from Iceland (with Louis MacNeice). New York: Random House, 1937; revised edition, 1969.
• Selected Poems. London: Faber, 1938.
• Journey to a War (with Christopher Isherwood). New York: Random House, 1939; revised edition, Faber, 1973.
• Another Time. New York: Random House, 1940.
• Some Poems. New York: Random House, 1940.
• Three Songs for St. Cecilia's Day. privately printed, 1941.
• The Double Man. New York: Random House, 1941
  • published in UK as New Year Letter. London: Faber, 1941.
• For the Time Being. New York: Random House, 1944.
• The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden. New York: Random House, 1945.
• Collected Shorter Poems, 1930-1944. New York: Random House, 1951.
• The Shield of Achilles. New York: Random House, 1955.
• The Old Man's Road. Voyages Press, 1956.
• A Gobble Poem ("snatched from the notebooks of W. H. Auden and now believed to be in the Morgan Library"). London: 1957.
• Selected Poetry. New York: Modern Library, 1959; 2nd edition, New York: Vintage, 1971.
• Homage to Clio. New York: Random House, 1960.
• W. Auden, A Selection (with critical essay by Richard Hoggart). London: Hutchinson, 1961.
• The Common Life (written in German; translated by Dieter Leisegang). Blaeschke, 1964.
• The Cave of the Making (written in German; translated by Dieter Leisegang). Blaeschke, 1965.
• Half-Way (limited edition). Lowell-Adams House Printers, 1965.
• About the House. New York: Random House, 1965.
• The Platonic Blow. New York: 1965.
• Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-57. London: Faber, 1966; New York: Random House, 1967.
• Portraits. Apiary Press, 1966.
• Marginalia. Ibex Press, 1966.
• A Selection by the Author. London: Faber, 1967.
• Selected Poems. London: Faber, 1968
  • revised edition, New York: Random House, 1979.
• Two Songs. Phoenix Book Shop, 1968.
• Collected Longer Poems. London: Faber, 1968; New York: Random House, 1969.
• City without Walls, and many other poems. New York: Random House, 1969.
• Academic Graffiti. London: Faber, 1971; New York: Random House, 1972.
• Selected Poems (with Leif Sjöberg). Pantheon, 1972.
• Epistle to a Godson, and other poems. New York: Random House, 1972.
• Poems and Lithographs (edited by John Russell). London: British Museum, 1974.
• Poems (lithographs by Henry Moore, edited by Vera Lindsay). Petersburg Press, 1974.
• Thank You Fog: Last poems. New York: Random House, 1974.
• Collected Poems (edited by Edward Mendelson). New York: Random House, 1976.
• Sue. Sycamore Press, 1977.
• "The Map of All My Youth:" Early works, friends, and influences (edited by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins). Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928 (edited by Katherine Bucknell). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Tell Me the Truth about Love: Ten poems. London: Faber, 1994; New York: Vintage, 1994
  • enlarged a Tell Me the Truth about Love: Fifteen poems. London: Faber, 1998.

Plays

• The Dance of Death (produced in London, 1934; produced in New York City, 1935; produced in Poughkeepsie, NY, as Come out into the Sun, 1935). London: Faber, 1933; 2nd edition, 1935.
•  The Dog beneath the Skin; or, Where is Francis? (with Christopher Isherwood)(produced in London, 1936; revised version produced in New York, 1947). London: Faber, 1935; New York: Random House, 1968.
• The Ascent of F6: A tragedy in two acts (produced in London, 1931; produced in New York, 1939), London: Faber, 1936; 2nd edition, 1957
  • published in U.S. as The Ascent of F6. New York: Random House, 1937; 2nd edition, 1956.
• Ernst Toller, No More Peace! A Thoughtful Comedy (adapted, with Edward Crankshaw) (produced in London, England, 1936; produced in New York, 1937). New York: Farrar Rinehart, 1937.
• On the Frontier: A melodrama in three acts (produced in London, 1939). New York: Random House, 1938.
• The Age of Anxiety: A baroque eclogue (performed Off-Broadway at the Attic Theatre, March 18, 1954). New York: Random House, 1947.
• Two Great Plays (with Christopher Isherwood; contains The Dog beneath the Skin & The Ascent of F6). New York: Random House, 1959.
• Plays, and other dramatic writings by W.H. Auden, 1928-1938 (With Christopher Isherwood; edited by Edward Mendelson). London: Faber, 1989.
• Also author of documentary screenplays in verse, including Night Mail 1936, Coal-Face 1936, & The Londoners 1938; author of radio plays, including Hadrian's Wall 1937, The Dark Valley 1940, and The Rocking-Horse Winner (adapted from the short story by D. H. Lawrence).

Non-fiction

• Education, Today, and Tomorrow (With T. C. Worley). London: Hogarth, 1939.
• Address on Henry James (booklet) New York: 1947.
• The Enchafed Flood; or, The romantic iconography of the sea, New York: Random House, 1950.
• Making, Knowing, and Judging. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1956.
• The Dyer's Hand, and other essays. New York: Random House, 1962.
• Louis MacNeice (memorial address). London: Faber, 1963.
• Shakespeare: Fünf Augsaetze. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: 1964.
• Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1964.
• Secondary Worlds (T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at University of Kent, 1967). London: Faber, 1968; New York: Random House, 1969.
• A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (annotated personal anthology). New York: Viking, 1970.
• Forewords and Afterwords (edited by Edward Mendelson). New York: Random House, 1973.
• Lectures on Shakespeare (edited by Arthur Kirsch). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Translated

• Adam Mickiewicz, 1798-1855: Selected Poems (with others). Noonday Press, 1956.
• Jean Cocteau, "The Knights of the Round Table", 1957; published in The Infernal Machine, and Other Plays. New York: New Directions, 1973.
• Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, The Seven Deadly Sins (ballet cantata) (with Chester Kallman), (performed at New York City Center, 1959).
• Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, published in Bertolt Brecht Plays, Volume I. London: Methuen, 1960.
• St. John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Saint-Leger Leger) On Poetry. Pantheon, 1961; also published in Two Addresses, 1966.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey (with Elizabeth Mayer). Pantheon, 1962.
• Dag Hammarskjoeld, Markings (With Leif Sjöberg, and author of foreword). New York: Knopf, 1964.
• St. John Perse, Two Addresses. Pantheon, 1966.
• Andrei Voznesenski, Antiworlds (with others, and author of foreword). Basic Books, 1966,
  • bilingual enlarged edition published as Antiworlds, and the Fifth Ace, 1967.
• Voeluspa: The Song of the Sybil (with Paul Beekman Taylor). Windhover Press, 1968.
• Edda Saemundar, The Elder Edda: A Selection. New York: Random House, 1969.
• St. John Perse, Collected Poems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther. New York: Random House, 1971.
• Gunnar Ekelöf, Selected Poems (with Leif Sjöberg). Pantheon, 1972.
• Paer Lagerkvist, Evening Land (with Leif Sjöberg). Wayne State University Press, 1975.
• Bertolt Brecht, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (with Chester Kallman). Godine, 1976.
• Norse Poems (with Paul B. Taylor). Athlone Press, 1981.

Edited

• Oxford Poetry, 1926 (edited with Charles Plumb). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1926.
• Oxford Poetry, 1927 (edited with C. Day Lewis). Appleton, 1927.
• The Poet's Tongue (edited with John Garrett).London: George Bell, 1935.
• Mechanics (edited with Arthur Elton). Longmans, Green, 1936.
• Oxford Book of Light Verse. Oxford University Press, 1938.
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, A Selection of the Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson. New York: Doubleday, 1944
  • published in UK as Tennyson: An introduction and a selection. London: Phoenix House, 1946.
• Henry James, American Scene. New York: Scribner, 1946.
• John Betjeman, Slick but Not Streamlined. New York: Doubleday, 1947.
• The Portable Greek Reader. New York: Viking, 1948.
• Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Prose and Poetry. Rinehart, 1950
  • revised edition, 1957.
• Poets of the English Language (edited with Norman Holmes Pearson). Volume 1: Medieval and Renaissance Poets: Langland to Spenser, Volume 2: Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets: Marlowe to Marvell, Volume 3: Restoration and Augustan Poets: Milton to Goldsmith, Volume 4: Romantic Poets: Blake to Poe, Volume 5: Victorian and Edwardian Poets: Tennyson to Yeats. Viking, 1950; Penguin, 1977,
• The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard. McKay, 1952
  • published in UK as Kierkegaard. London: Cassell, 1955.
• Riverside Poetry 1953: Poems by Students in Colleges and Universities in New York City (edited with Marianne Moore and Karl Shapiro). Association Press, 1953.
• An Elizabethan Song Book: Lute Songs, madrigals, and rounds (edited with Chester Kallman and Noah Greenberg). New York:Doubleday, 1956
  • also published as An Anthology of Elizabethan Lute Songs, Madrigals, and Rounds. Norton, 1970.
• Selected Writings of Sydney Smith. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1956.
• The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse. Criterion, 1956
  • published in UK as The Faber Book of Modern American Verse. London: Faber, 1956.
• Van Gogh: A Self Portrait (selected letters). New York Graphic Society, 1961.
• Joseph Jacobs, The Pied Piper, and other fairy tales. Macmillan, 1963.
• The Viking Book of Aphorisms (edited with Louis Kronenberger).new York: Viking, 1963
  • published as The Faber Book of Aphorisms. London: Faber, 1964.
• Walter de la Mare, A Choice of de la Mare's Verse. London: Faber, 1963.
• Louis MacNeice, Selected Poems. London: Faber, 1964.
• Nineteenth-Century British Minor Poets. Delacorte, 1966
  • published in UK as Nineteenth-Century Minor Poets.London: Faber, 1967.
• To Nevill Cognill from Friends (edited with John Lawlor). London: Faber, 1966.
• Lord Byron, Selected Poetry and Prose of George Gordon, Lord Byron. New York:, New American Library, 1966.
• Louis MacNeice, Persons from Porlock, and ther plays for radio. BBC Productions, 1969.
• G.K. Chesterton, A Selection from His Non-Fictional Prose. London: Faber, 1970.
• George Herbert, Penguin, 1973.
• Thomas Campion, Selected Songs of Thomas Campion. Godine, 1973.
• Also editor and author of forewords of Yale Series of Younger Poets series, 1947-59. Coeditor of "The Looking Glass Library" series of children's books.

Collected editions

• The English Auden: Poems, essays, and dramatic writings (edited by Edward Mendelson). London: Faber, 1977; New York: Random House, 1978.
• Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Wystan Hugh Auden - As I Walked Out One Evening (1937)

WH Auden recites "Doggerel by a Senior Citizen" 1969

Audio / video

• W.H. Auden Reading his own poems (78). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Film Service, 1941.
• W.H. Auden Reading from his work (LP). New York: Caedmon, 1953.
• W.H. Auden Reads a selection of his poems (LP). New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1960; London: Argo, 1960.
• Selected Poems (LP). New Rochelle, NY: Spoken Arts, 1961.
• The Poetry of W.H. Auden (cassette). New York: Jeffrey Norton, 1977.
• W.H. Auden (CD). New York: Random House, 1999.

Except where noted, discographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

Preceded by Cecil Day-Lewis

Oxford Professor of Poetry 1956-1961

Succeeded by Robert Graves

See also: Category:Poetry by W. H. Auden, Category:Books by W. H. Auden, Category:Plays by W. H. Auden , and Category:Libretti by W. H. Auden

W.H. Auden Funeral Blues - BBC's Best Version on You Tube

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939 Poem

"If I Could Tell You" by W.H. Auden (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

• List of British poets
• List of U.S. poets
• List of literary critics

References

See also the listings on the criticism page at the W. H. Auden Society web site. In the list below, unless noted, publication data and ISBN refer to the first editions; many titles are also available in later reprints.

Bibliography

O Tell Me the Truth About Love by W.H. Auden (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

• Bloomfield, B. C., and Edward Mendelson (1972). W.H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924-1969. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-0395-5. See post-1969 supplements in Auden Studies series listed below.

Biography and criticism

• Carpenter, Humphrey (1981). W.H. Auden: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-928044-9.
• Clark, Thekla (1995). Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17591-0.
• Davenport-Hines, Richard (1996). Auden. London: Heinemann. ISBN 0-434-17507-2.
• Farnan, Dorothy J. (1984). Auden in Love. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-50418-5.
• Fuller, John (1998). W.H. Auden: A Commentary. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19268-8.
• Hecht, Anthony (1993). The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-39006-7.
• Mendelson, Edward (1981). Early Auden. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-28712-1.
• Mendelson, Edward (1999). Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-18408-9.
• Osborne, Charles (1979). W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet. London: Eyre Methuen. ISBN 978-0-87131-788-9
• Smith, Stan, ed. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to W H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82962-3.
• Spears, Monroe K. (1963). The Poetry of W.H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Spender, Stephen, ed. (1975). W.H. Auden: A Tribute. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-76884-0.
• Wright, George T. (1969; rev. ed. 1981). W.H. Auden. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-7346-0.

Special topics

• Haffenden, John, ed. (1983). W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-9350-0. Selected reviews of Auden's books and plays.
• Kirsch, Arthur (2005). Auden and Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10814-1.
• Mitchell, Donald (1981), Britten and Auden in the Thirties: the year 1936. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-11715-5.
• Myers, Alan, and Robert Forsythe (1999), W. H. Auden: Pennine Poet . Nenthead: North Pennines Heritage Trust. ISBN 0-9513535-7-8. Pamphlet with map and gazetteer.

Auden Studies series

• Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1990) "The Map of All My Youth": early works, friends and influences (Auden Studies 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-812964-5.
• Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1994). "The Language of Learning and the Language of Love": uncollected writings, new interpretations (Auden Studies 2). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-812257-8.
• Auden, W.H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1995). "In Solitude, For Company": W.H. Auden after 1940: unpublished prose and recent criticism (Auden Studies 3). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-818294-5.

External links

Poems

• "Stop all the clocks; put out the telephone"
• "On Being a Poet"
• W.H. Auden profile & 14 poems at the Academy of American Poets.
• W.H. Auden at the Poetry Foundation.
• Poems at the Auden Society
• Wystan Hugh Auden at PoemHunter (71 poems).

Quotes

• W.H. Auden quotes at BrainyQuote

Audio / video

• W.H. Auden (1907-1973) at The Poetry Archive
• "Auden reads "On Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics"". http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/outloud/auden.shtml. Retrieved 2007-01-21. 
• W.H. Auden poems at YouTube
• "Recorded interviews with the BBC". http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/audenw1.shtml. Retrieved 2007-01-21. 
• Yale College Lecture on W.H. Auden audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses

Books

• W.H. Auden at Amazon.com

About

• W.H. Auden in the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
• W.H. Auden at NNDB.
• W.H. Auden at Biography.com
• Wystan Hugh Auden at Poets' Corner (Westminster Abbey)
• Michael Newman (Spring 1974). "W.H. Auden, The Art of Poetry No. 17". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/3970. Retrieved 2007-01-21. 
• Gopnik, Adam. ""The Double Man: Why Auden is an indispensable poet of our time", The New Yorker, 23 Sept. 2002". http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/020923crat_atlarge?critics/020923crat_atlarge. Retrieved 2007-01-21. 
• Fenton, James (2007-02-03). ""A voice of his own", The Guardian, 3 Feb. 2007". London. http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetry/features/0,,2004611,00.html. Retrieved 2007-02-03. 
• Bucknell, Katherine (2007-02-04). ""In praise of a guilty genius", The Observer, 4 Feb. 2007". The Guardian (London). http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetry/features/0,,2005358,00.html. Retrieved 2007-02-06. 
• "W.H. Auden at Swarthmore". http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/auden. Retrieved 2007-01-20. 
• "Who was the Worst Famous Poet of the 20th Century?" by John Dolan at AlterNet.

Etc.

• Archival material relating to W.H. Auden listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• "The W.H. Auden Society: news, links, books, notes, etc.". http://audensociety.org/. Retrieved 2007-01-21. 
• "Back issues of The W.H. Auden Society Newsletter". http://audensociety.org/archives.html. Retrieved 2007-01-21.