W. H.

Auden
1
W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Auden in 1939 (from the Library of Congress)
Born Wystan Hugh Auden
21 February 1907
York, England
Died 29 September 1973 (aged66)
Vienna, Austria
Residence York, Birmingham, Oxford (UK); Berlin (Germany); Helensburgh, Colwall, London (UK); New York, Ann Arbor, Swarthmore
(US); Ischia (Italy); Kirchstetten (Austria); Oxford (UK)
Ethnicity English
Citizenship British from birth, American from 1946
Education M.A. English language and literature
Almamater Christ Church, Oxford
Occupation Poet
Religion Christianity (Anglicanism)
Spouse(s) Erika Mann (unconsummated marriage, 1935, to provide her with a British passport)
Relatives George Augustus Auden (father), Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden (mother), George Bernard Auden (brother), John Bicknell
Auden (brother)
Wystan Hugh Auden
[1]
(/wstnHelp:IPA for English#KeyhjuHelp:IPA for English#Keydn/;
[2]
21 February
1907 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,
[3][4]
born in England,
later an American citizen, and is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work
is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety in
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.
Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ
Church, Oxford. His early poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, written in an intense and dramatic tone and in
a style that alternated between telegraphic modern and fluent traditional, established his reputation as a left-wing
political poet and prophet. In the late 1930s he became uncomfortable in this role and abandoned it after he moved to
W. H. Auden
2
the United States in 1939, where in 1946 he became an American citizen. In his poems from the 1940s he explored
religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than in his earlier works, and combined traditional forms and
styles with new, original forms. The focus of many of his poems from the 1950s and 1960s was on the ways in
which words revealed and concealed emotions. He took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally
suited to direct expression of strong feelings.
He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects,
and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his
career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop
all the clocks"), "Muse des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939",
became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.
Life
Childhood
Auden's birthplace, 54 Bootham, York
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 third of three sons; the eldest, George Bernard
Auden, became a farmer, while the second, John Bicknell Auden, became a
geologist. Auden, whose grandfathers were both Church of England
clergymen, grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household that 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.
[5]
In 1908 his family moved to Solihull, near 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 eight 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 fifteen 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, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood,
later famous in his own right as a novelist.
[6]
At thirteen he went to Gresham's School in Norfolk; there, in 1922,
when his friend Robert Medley asked him if he wrote poetry, Auden first realised 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,
[7]
and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his last year at Gresham's.
[8]
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).
[9]
In 1925 he went up 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 four were
W. H. Auden
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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 third-class degree.
He was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925 by his fellow student A. S. T. Fisher. 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 193539 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.
From his Oxford years onward, Auden's 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.
Britain and Europe, 192838
In the autumn of 1928, Auden left Britain for nine months in Berlin, partly to rebel against English repressiveness. In
Berlin, he said, he first experienced the political and economic unrest that became one of his central subjects.
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 and Faber; the firm also published all his later books. In 1930 he began five years
as a schoolmaster in boys' schools: two years at the Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, Scotland, then three 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 three 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 idealised "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.
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,
Auden spent three 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 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 six 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 Auden's poems during the 1930s and afterward were inspired by unconsummated love, and in the 1950s he
summarised 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, Auden
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
W. H. Auden
4
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.
United States and Europe, 193973
Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York City 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 this time, Auden met the
poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next two years (Auden described their relation as a "marriage"
that began with a cross-country "honeymoon" journey). In 1941 Kallman ended their sexual relationship 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.
Christopher Isherwood (left) and W. H. Auden (right)
photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 6 February 1939
In 194041, Auden lived in a house at 7 Middagh Street
in Brooklyn Heights, which he shared with Carson
McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others, and which
became a famous center of artistic life, nicknamed
"February House". In 1940, Auden 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, and partly by
reading Sren 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 194142 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 194243 but did not use it, choosing instead to teach
at Swarthmore College in 194245.
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, 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 naturalised 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 in 1958, in
Kirchstetten, Austria, where he bought a farmhouse, and, he said, shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first
W. H. Auden
5
time.
In 1951, shortly before the two 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 195661, Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University where he was required to give three 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 in Manhattan's East Village, and to summer in Europe, spending only three weeks each year lecturing in
Oxford. He now earned his income mostly by readings and lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker, The
New York Review of Books, 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, Auden 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.
Work
See also: Bibliography of W. H. Auden
Overview
Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was
encyclopaedic 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
clichs 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 four hundred 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, and 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 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.)
W. H. Auden
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Early work, 192239
Up to 1930
Auden began writing poems at thirteen, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, especially Wordsworth,
and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas Hardy. At eighteen he discovered T. S. Eliot and adopted an
extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his own voice at twenty when he wrote the first 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 first 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-a-play, introduced the mixed styles and content of much of his later work. This drama and thirty short
poems appeared in his first published book Poems (1930, 2nd edition with seven 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).
193135
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
Hlderlin. Around this time his main influences were Dante, William Langland, and Alexander Pope.
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 recognised. 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.
W. H. Auden
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193639
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". 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 "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 "Muse 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, 194057
194046
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 had 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 recognising the temptation to break them ("In Sickness and Health"). From 1942 through 1947
he worked mostly on three 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 in 1947).
The first two, with Auden's other new poems from 1940 to 1944, were included in his first collected edition, The
Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), with most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions.
W. H. Auden
8
194757
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 194857, 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 emphasised 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 two libretti
for operas by Hans Werner Henze.
Auden's first separate prose book was The Enchafd 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
seven Good Friday poems, "Horae Canonicae", an encyclopaedic 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 seven 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 195556 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).
Later work, 195873
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 195566 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
195661, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s.
While translating the haiku and other verse in Dag Hammarskjld'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 two 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.
W. H. Auden
9
Auden in 1970
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) was a kind of self-portrait made up of
favourite 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 ageing ("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, two recurring themes in
his later years.
Reputation and influence
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).
Commemorative plaque at one of
Auden's homes in Brooklyn Heights,
New York
In the US, 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. Auden was one of three
candidates recommended by the Nobel Committee to the Swedish Academy
for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963.
Roadsign to Auden's house in
Kirchstetten, now a museum
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
favour 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".
A memorial stone for Auden was placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster
Abbey in 1974.
Public recognition of Auden's work sharply 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 ten of his poems, Tell Me the
W. H. Auden
10
Truth About Love, sold more than 275,000 copies. After 11 September 2001 his 1939 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.
Published works
The following list includes only the books of poems and essays that Auden prepared during his lifetime; for a more
complete list, including other works and posthumous editions, see W. H. Auden bibliography.
In the list below, works reprinted in the Complete Works of W. H. Auden are indicated by footnote references.
Books
Poems (London, 1930; second edn., seven poems substituted, London, 1933; includes poems and Paid on Both
Sides: A Charade) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood).
The Orators: An English Study (London, 1932, verse and prose; slightly revised edn., London, 1934; revised edn.
with new preface, London, 1966; New York 1967) (dedicated to Stephen Spender).
The Dance of Death (London, 1933, play) (dedicated to Robert Medley and Rupert Doone).
Poems (New York, 1934; contains Poems [1933 edition], The Orators [1932 edition], and The Dance of Death).
The Dog Beneath the Skin (London, New York, 1935; play, with Christopher Isherwood) (dedicated to Robert
Moody).
The Ascent of F6 (London, 1936; 2nd edn., 1937; New York, 1937; play, with Christopher Isherwood) (dedicated
to John Bicknell Auden).
Look, Stranger! (London, 1936, poems; US edn., On This Island, New York, 1937) (dedicated to Erika Mann)
Letters from Iceland (London, New York, 1937; verse and prose, with Louis MacNeice) (dedicated to George
Augustus Auden).
On the Frontier (London, 1938; New York 1939; play, with Christopher Isherwood) (dedicated to Benjamin
Britten).
Journey to a War (London, New York, 1939; verse and prose, with Christopher Isherwood) (dedicated to E. M.
Forster).
Another Time (London, New York 1940; poetry) (dedicated to Chester Kallman).
The Double Man (New York, 1941, poems; UK edn., New Year Letter, London, 1941) (Dedicated to Elizabeth
Mayer).
For the Time Being (New York, 1944; London, 1945; two long poems: "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary
on Shakespeare's The Tempest", dedicated to James and Tania Stern, and "For the Time Being: A Christmas
Oratorio", in memoriam Constance Rosalie Auden [Auden's mother]).
The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York, 1945; includes new poems) (dedicated to Christopher
Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (New York, 1947; London, 1948; verse; won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for
Poetry) (dedicated to John Betjeman).
Collected Shorter Poems, 19301944 (London, 1950; similar to 1945 Collected Poetry) (dedicated to Christopher
Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
The Enchafd Flood (New York, 1950; London, 1951; prose) (dedicated to Alan Ansen).
Nones (New York, 1951; London, 1952; poems) (dedicated to Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr)
The Shield of Achilles (New York, London, 1955; poems) (won the 1956 National Book Award for Poetry)
[10]
(dedicated to Lincoln and Fidelma Kirstein).
Homage to Clio (New York, London, 1960; poems) (dedicated to E. R. and A. E. Dodds).
The Dyer's Hand (New York, 1962; London, 1963; essays) (dedicated to Nevill Coghill).
About the House (New York, London, 1965; poems) (dedicated to Edmund and Elena Wilson).
W. H. Auden
11
Collected Shorter Poems 19271957 (London, 1966; New York, 1967) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and
Chester Kallman).
Collected Longer Poems (London, 1968; New York, 1969).
Secondary Worlds (London, New York, 1969; prose) (dedicated to Valerie Eliot).
City Without Walls and Other Poems (London, New York, 1969) (dedicated to Peter Heyworth).
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (New York, London, 1970; quotations with commentary) (dedicated to
Geoffrey Grigson).
Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems (London, New York, 1972) (dedicated to Orlan Fox).
Forewords and Afterwords (New York, London, 1973; essays) (dedicated to Hannah Arendt).
Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (London, New York, 1974) (dedicated to Michael and Marny Yates).
Film scripts and opera libretti
Coal Face (1935, closing chorus for GPO Film Unit documentary).
Night Mail (1936, narrative for GPO Film Unit documentary, not published separately except as a program note).
Paul Bunyan (1941, libretto for operetta by Benjamin Britten; not published until 1976).
The Rake's Progress (1951, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Igor Stravinsky).
Elegy for Young Lovers (1956, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Hans Werner Henze).
The Bassarids (1961, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Hans Werner Henze based on The Bacchae
of Euripides).
Runner (1962, documentary film narrative for National Film Board of Canada)
Love's Labour's Lost (1973, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Nicolas Nabokov, based on
Shakespeare's play).
Musical collaborations
Our Hunting Fathers (1936, song cycle written for Benjamin Britten)
An Evening of Elizabethan Verse and its Music (1954 recording with the New York Pro Musica Antiqua, director
Noah Greenberg; Auden spoke the verse texts)
The Play of Daniel (1958, verse narration for a production by the New York Pro Musica Antiqua, director Noah
Greenberg)
Notes
[1] The name Wystan derives from the 9th-century St Wystan, who was murdered by Beorhtwulf, king of Mercia, after Wystan objected to
Beorthtwulf's plan to marry Wystan's mother. His remains were reburied at Repton, Derbyshire, where they became the object of a cult; the
parish church of Repton is named St Wystan's. Auden's father, George Augustus Auden, was educated at Repton School.
[2] [2] The first syllable of "Auden" rhymes with "law" (not with "how").
[3] Auden used the phrase "Anglo-American Poets" in 1943, implicitly referring to himself and T. S. Eliot.
[4] The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED (2008 revision) is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England (or Britain) and
America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also the definition "an American,
especially a citizen of the United States, of English origin or descent" in See also the definition "a native or descendant of a native of England
who has settled in or become a citizen of America, esp. of the United States" from The Random House Dictionary, 2009, available online at
[5] [5] In "Letter to Lord Byron" he names the saga character Auun Skkull as one of his ancestors.
[6] Harry Blamires, A Guide to twentieth century literature in English (1983), p. 130
[7] The Times, 5 July 1922 (Issue 43075), p. 12, col. D
[8] Wright, Hugh, "Auden and Gresham's" in Conference & Common Room, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer 2007 (http:/ / candcr. co. uk/ uploaded/
documents/ candcr/ 172 C& CR Vol 44.2.pdf) online at schoolsearch.co.uk (accessed 25 April 2008)
[9] The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934) title details (http:/ / books. google. com/
books?id=WkJAAAAAIAAJ& pgis=1) at books.google.com
[10] "National Book Awards 1956" (http:/ / www.nationalbook. org/ nba1956. html). National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-02-27.
(With acceptance speech by Auden and essay by Megan Snyder-Camp from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
W. H. Auden
12
References
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
Printed sources
See also the listings on the criticism page at the W.H. Auden Society web site (http:/ / audensociety. org/ criticism.
html). In the list below, unless noted, publication data and ISBN refer to the first editions; many titles are also
available in later reprints.
Bibliography
Bloomfield, B. C., and Edward Mendelson (1972). W.H. Auden: A Bibliography 19241969. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-0395-5. See post-1969 supplements in Auden Studies series listed
below.
General biographical and critical studies
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.
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.
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 (http:/ / www. forsythe. demon. co. uk/
other_pages/ BKAUD. HTM). Nenthead: North Pennines Heritage Trust. ISBN 0-9513535-7-8. Pamphlet with
map and gazetteer.
W. H. Auden
13
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
Wikiquote has quotations related to: W. H. Auden
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
W. H. Auden
Wikimedia Commons has media related to W. H. Auden.
See also the descriptive list on the links page at the W.H. Auden Society web site (http:/ / audensociety. org/ links.
html).
Archival material relating to W. H. Auden (https:/ / apps. nationalarchives. gov. uk/ nra/ searches/ subjectView.
asp?ID=P1005) listed at the UK National Archives
Works by W. H. Auden on Open Library at the Internet Archive
Works by or about W. H. Auden (http:/ / worldcat. org/ identities/ lccn-n79-54316) in libraries (WorldCat
catalog)
"The W. H. Auden Society" (http:/ / audensociety. org/ ). Retrieved 21 January 2007.
"Fourteen poems by Auden (Academy of American Poets site)" (http:/ / www. poets. org/ poet. php/ prmPID/
120). Retrieved 20 January 2007.
"W. H. Auden on the BBC Poetry Season site (warning: links not available outside UK)" (http:/ / www. bbc. co.
uk/ poetryseason/ poets/ wh_auden. shtml). Retrieved 6 July 2009.
"Auden reads "On Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics"" (http:/ / www. bbc. co. uk/ arts/ poetry/ outloud/
auden. shtml). Retrieved 21 January 2007.
"Recorded interviews with the BBC" (http:/ / www. bbc. co. uk/ bbcfour/ audiointerviews/ profilepages/ audenw1.
shtml). Retrieved 21 January 2007.
Michael Newman (Spring 1974). "W. H. Auden, The Art of Poetry No. 17" (http:/ / www. theparisreview. com/
viewinterview. php/ prmMID/ 3970). Paris Review. Retrieved 21 January 2007.
Fenton, James (3 February 2007). ""A voice of his own", The Guardian, 3 Feb. 2007" (http:/ / books. guardian.
co. uk/ poetry/ features/ 0,,2004611,00. html). London. Retrieved 3 February 2007.
Bucknell, Katherine (4 February 2007). ""In praise of a guilty genius", The Observer, 4 Feb. 2007" (http:/ / books.
guardian. co. uk/ poetry/ features/ 0,,2005358,00. html). The Guardian (London). Retrieved 6 February 2007.
"W. H. Auden at Swarthmore" (http:/ / www. swarthmore. edu/ library/ auden). Retrieved 20 January 2007.
"The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter" (http:/ / audensociety. org/ archives. html). Retrieved 21 January 2007.
"W. H. Auden Family Ghosts (extensive genealogical website)" (http:/ / www. stanford. edu/ group/ auden/
cgi-bin/ auden). Retrieved 18 November 2012.
W. H. Auden
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Yale College Lecture on W.H. Auden (http:/ / oyc. yale. edu/ english/ engl-310/ lecture-22) audio, video and
full transcripts from Open Yale Courses
Article Sources and Contributors
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Article Sources and Contributors
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