W. H. Auden

British poet

• Born: February 21, 1907
• Birthplace: York, England
• Died: September 29, 1973
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

During a career that spanned nearly fifty years, Auden produced a vast and varied body of poetry ranging from comic songs and memorable love lyrics to longer poems and poetic sequences that reflected his deep concern for the social, political, and religious conditions of twentieth century life. He also wrote libretti for opera, much of it with his life partner Chester Kallman.

Early Life

W. H. Auden (AW-duhn) was born in York, England. His father, George Auden, was a medical doctor whose scholarly interests included psychology, geology, and archaeology. His mother, Constance Bicknell Auden, earned a degree in French and trained as a nurse prior to marriage. Both parents, especially his mother, were devout Anglicans, and Auden grew up in a house where intellectual pursuits and religious devotion were highly prized. As a boy, he developed a fascination for the ruined industrial landscapes and mining machinery that sometimes figure in his work. He imagined growing up to be a mining engineer.

Auden was educated at St. Edmund’s School in Surrey (1915-1920) and Gresham’s School in Holt (1920-1925). Though interested in science at St. Edmund’s, Auden nevertheless became head of the literary society. By the time he left the school, he was fully aware that he was gay, having developed an intense attraction to a member of the school staff. In March, 1922, prompted by a question from a school friend at Gresham’s, Auden realized suddenly that his true vocation was to be a poet. At around this time, he began to lose his Christian faith.

During his remaining time at Gresham’s, Auden wrote poems modeled on the work of various poetic mentors, ranging from William Wordsworth to Thomas Hardy. At Christ Church, Oxford, where he enrolled initially as a science student, Auden ended up studying English and continued to write poetry, much of it influenced by T. S. Eliot. At Oxford (1925-1928), he published poems in magazines, and in 1928, his friend Stephen Spender privately printed Poems, a pamphlet of Auden’s early work.

Life’s Work

After taking his degree, Auden lived for a time in Berlin (1929) and then taught at two preparatory schools, Larchfield Academy (1930-1932) and Downs School (1932-1935). The 1930’s constitute what some have called the English phase of his career, a time of intense productivity and intellectual experimentation that made him a literary celebrity. He published two influential collections of verse, Poems (1930) and Look Stranger! (1936) (American edition, On This Island, 1937). He also collaborated with his friend Christopher Isherwood on three experimental plays for the Group Theatre, including The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935). Auden traveled extensively during this time. A visit to Iceland with poet Louis MacNeice resulted in their joint travel book Letters from Iceland (1937). That same year, Auden traveled to Spain to work for the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, publishing Spain (1937), a propaganda poem in pamphlet form. Near the end of the decade, a visit to war-torn China with Isherwood resulted in another collaboration, Journey to a War (1939), which includes Auden’s highly regarded sonnet sequence, “In Time of War.”

In 1939, Auden moved to the United States to escape the social and artistic confinement he felt in England. He made his living as a freelance writer and as a teacher, taking temporary appointments at various colleges, including Michigan, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, Bennington, Barnard, and Mount Holyoke. Most of the time, however, Auden lived and wrote in New York and came to consider himself a New Yorker. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Auden met and fell in love with Chester Kallman, an eighteen-year-old college student from Brooklyn. Though their sexual relationship was short lived, the two remained companions for the rest of their lives, and Auden regarded their relationship as a marriage.

Another major shift at the beginning of the 1940’s was Auden’s return to Christianity, which transformed his writing. The main poetic work of the ensuing decade was a series of long poems informed by Auden’s renewed Christianity and his reading of Protestant theology. These poems appeared in The Double Man (1941) (British title, New Year Letter), For the Time Being (1944), and The Age of Anxiety (1947), which won a Pulitzer Prize. Auden’s other volumes during the 1940’s include Another Time (1940) and The Collected Poetry (1945).

In 1948, Auden moved again, renting a house on the island of Ischia off the Italian coast. He spent summers on Ischia for nearly a decade, writing poetry there and returning to New York each winter, where he wrote prose as a means of supporting himself. In Italy he began to write a less cerebral, more earthbound poetry, joyously celebrating the here-and-now, as he does in the first poem he wrote in Italy, “In Praise of Limestone.” During this period, Auden also began to collaborate with Kallman on opera libretti, the most enduring of which is The Rake’s Progress, with music by Igor Stravinsky. The Rake’s Progress was first performed in Venice in 1951. Auden and Kallman later collaborated with the composers Hans Werner Henze and Nicholas Nabokov.

In the middle of his Italian decade, Auden was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, an honor that required him to deliver a series of lectures, which later were published in his prose volume The Dyer’s Hand (1962). Important new books of poetry during this decade were Nones (1951) and The Shield of Achilles (1955), which contains the major poetic sequence “Horae Canonicae.”

Auden left Italy in 1958 and moved to Kirchstetten, an Austrian village, where he purchased a modest farmhouse. For the rest of his life, Auden summered in Austria, settling into a domestic routine as a citizen of the village and traveling to nearby Vienna with Kallman to attend operas. During this phase of his life, Auden continued to write prolifically, producing poetry, prose, and (with Kallman) libretti. His best collections from the Austrian years are generally thought to be About the House (1965), which includes a series of poems about his beloved farmhouse, and City Without Walls (1969).

In 1972, increasingly ill and lonely, Auden decided to leave New York for good and spend winters at Christ Church, Oxford, which had offered him a residence. His return to England was disappointing, for he found Oxford changed, the atmosphere no longer congenial. He spent the next summer in Austria, as usual. On the way back to England in the autumn, he stopped overnight in Vienna to give a poetry reading. He died of a heart attack in his hotel bed early the next morning, September 29, 1973, and was buried five days later in Kirchstetten. A memorial stone was installed in London’s Westminster Abbey the following year.

Significance

Auden is generally recognized as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. Unlike many poets of the time, he addressed public, civic concerns. In the 1930’s many regarded him as a spokesperson for a new generation, a diagnostician of social and political ills. In the 1940’s, he continued to speak, sometimes as a critic, sometimes as a healer, in an era that he himself famously dubbed “the age of anxiety.” In the last twenty years of his life, he became in some sense a Cold War poet, his work addressing the challenges of living a humane, ethical life in an increasingly hostile world.

While notably a public poet, Auden also wrote intensely personal lyrics and songs, which transcend the time in which they were written. He wrote movingly about love, death, friendship, and other great themes of lyric poetry, often using traditional verse forms. In 1994, Tell Me the Truth About Love, a pamphlet containing several of his love poems from the 1930’s, became a surprise best seller, confirming his stature as a poet whose work is both timely and timeless.

Bibliography

Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. New York: Modern Library, 2007. Contains authorized versions of all the poems Auden wished to preserve. Useful appendixes give variant titles and titles of poems excluded from this edition.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Dyer’s Hand. New York: Vintage, 1990. Selected prose writings about art, literature, music, and contemporary life, including the lectures Auden delivered as Oxford professor of poetry.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939. Edited by Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1977. Selection of early work, most of it first published prior to Auden’s departure for the United States.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Selected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. Expanded ed. New York: Vintage, 2007. Poems from every phase of Auden’s career, including work omitted from Collected Poems. Reprints original versions of poems later revised by Auden.

Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Detailed biography that draws on recollections of those who knew Auden personally and on letters and manuscripts previously unavailable to the reading public.

Davenport-Hines, Richard. Auden. New York: Pantheon, 1995. Comprehensive biography that gives greater attention to Auden’s poetry than does Carpenter.

Fuller, John. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Detailed annotations and interpretations of Auden’s poems, plays, and libretti. Organized chronologically, with a comprehensive general index and index of titles and first lines.

Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. New York: Viking, 1981. History and interpretation of Auden’s work from 1927 to his departure for the United States in 1939.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Continuation of Early Auden, tracing Auden’s development as a thinker and poet from 1939 to his death in 1973.