W[YSTAN]. H[UGH]. AUDEN
(21 February 1907–29 September 1973)
The prolific Anglo-American poet, playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist W.
H. Auden was throughout his career both controversial and influential. He was a poet
of analytical clarity who sought for order and universal patterns of human existence.
His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his
extensive travels provided rich material for his verse.
Auden’s beliefs changed radically between his youthful
career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of
socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later
phase in America, when his central preoccupation became
the theology of modern Protestant theologians. Ever since
the publication of his early collection Poems in 1930, he
has been admired for his extraordinary wit, the vast range
of his intellect, his unsurpassed technical virtuosity, and
an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse
form. He incorporated into his work popular culture,
W. H. Auden 1968
current events, and vernacular speech, drawing easily
from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms,
political theories, and scientific information. Regarded by many as one of the greatest
writers of the 20th century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding
generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.
Wystan Hugh Auden was the 3 rd of 3 sons born in a heavily industrialized
section of York, England, to a professional middle-class family. His father George
Augustus Auden was a prominent physician with extensive knowledge of mythology
and folklore, and his mother Constance Rosalie Auden (née Bicknell) trained as a
missionary nurse. Auden, whose grandfathers were both Church of England
clergymen, grew up in a “High Anglican” household with doctrines and rituals
resembling those of Roman Catholicism. He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and
had a lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas. In 1908 his
family moved to Homer Road, Solihull, near Birmingham, where his father, whose
library informed Auden’s lifelong psychoanalytic interests, had been appointed the
School Medical Officer and Lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health. His first
boarding school was St Edmund’s School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met
Christopher Isherwood, later famous in his own right as a novelist. At 13 he went to
Gresham’s School in Norfolk, where he began writing poems, mostly in the styles of
19th-century Romantic poets. At 18 he discovered T. S. Eliot and adopted an extreme
version of Eliot’s style, finding his own voice only at 20 when he wrote “The Letter,”
later included in his pamphlet Poems (1928), hand-printed by Stephen Spender. This
and other poems of the late 1920s show a clipped, elusive style that alludes to, but
does not directly state, themes of loneliness and loss.
In 1925 Auden’s early interest in science and engineering earned him a
Snodgrass, Auden Introduction 2
scholarship in biology to Christ Church, Oxford, but, although his attraction to
science never completely waned, he switched to English by his 2 nd
year. At Oxford, Auden grew familiar with modernist poetry and
became the pivotal member of the “Oxford Group” of writers,
including Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and
Christopher Isherwood (who became his literary mentor over the
next few years), which addressed anti-fascist social, political, and
economic concerns. At intervals in the 1930s Auden and Isherwood
maintained a sexual friendship, in between relationships with other
lovers, and collaborated in 1935–39 on 3 plays and a travel book.
His Oxford friends uniformly described Auden as funny,
extravagant, sympathetic, generous, but also lonely, partly by his
W. H. Auden 1926
own choice. Punctual in his habits but obsessive about meeting
deadlines, he was diffident and shy in private but publicly often
dogmatic and comically overbearing.
After leaving Oxford and spending 9 months in Berlin, partly to rebel against
English repressiveness, Auden began 2 years as a schoolmaster in Scotland, then 3
years at the Downs School in the Malvern Hills, Herefordshire. His first dramatic
work Paid on Both Sides (1928) combined the style and content of Icelandic sagas
with jokes from English school life. A similiar mixture of styles and content
characterized Poems (1930), which was accepted by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber.
Much of Auden’s poetry during the 1930s and afterward focused on unconsummated
love; his personal relations (and unsuccessful courtships) tended to be transient and
unequal either in age or intelligence. Another recurrent theme in these early poems is
the effect of “family ghosts,” Auden's term for the powerful psychological effects of
preceding generations on any individual life. After The Orators (1932), which was
largely about hero-worship in personal and political life, many of his poems took their
form and style from traditional ballads, popular songs, and expansive classical forms
like the Odes of Horace. Auden had a gift for friendship and, starting in the late
1930s, a strong wish for the stability of marriage, which he once called “the only
subject.” Throughout his life, he was capable of remarkable charitable acts, sometimes
in public (like his marriage of convenience to Erika Mann in 1935, which allowed her
to escape the Nazis), but more often in private, being embarrassed if his charity was
made widely public, as in 1956 when his gift to the Catholic Worker movement was
reported on the front page of The New York Times.
Auden’s lively poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, written in an intense
and nervous dramatic tone that alternates between the telegraphic modern and fluent
traditional, established his reputation as a left-wing political poet-prophet and the
leading voice of a new generation. Exposed to the industrial stagnation and mass
unemployment of the 1930s’ Great Depression, Auden’s early poetry diagnoses the ills
of his country, combining deliberate irreverence, even clowning, with cunning verbal
craftsmanship and drawing on both Freud and Marx to depict England partly as the
victim of an antiquated economic system and partly as a nation of neurotic invalids.
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From 1935 until he left Britain early in 1939, Auden worked as a freelance reviewer,
essayist, and lecturer, initially with the documentary film-making branch of the postal
service, where he collaborated with Benjamin Britten on plays, song cycles, and a
libretto. In 1936 he spent 3 months in Iceland gathering material for a travel book
Letters from Iceland (1937), written in collaboration with MacNeice.
In his enfant terrible stage of the 1930s—which included the verse drama The
Dance of Death (1933) and the plays The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of
F6 (1937, written in collaboration with Isherwood), and Look, Stranger! (1936,
retitled On This Island in the 1937 US edition)—Auden’s was considered a
progressive and accessible poetic voice, in contrast to the politically nostalgic and
poetically obscure voice of T. S. Eliot. During these years, he generally wrote about a
revolutionary transformation of society from a closed-off psychology of fear to an
open psychology of love. The themes in the shorter poems (like “Danse Macabre” and
“Lullaby”) also address the fragility and transience of personal love. His sympathies
being with the Left, like most intellectuals of his age, Auden went to Spain in 1937
during the Spanish Civil War, intending to serve as an
ambulance driver on the left-wing Republican side, but he
was put to work broadcasting propaganda, a job he left to
visit the front. His 7-week sojourn to Spain affected him
deeply; he was so disturbed and surprised by the sight of
the many Roman Catholic churches gutted and looted by
the Republicans that he quickly returned to England.
Uncomfortable with his earlier views, Auden wrote
in 1938 a series of dark, mock-comic ballads about
narcissistic individual failure (“Miss Gee,” “James
Honeyman,” “Victor”), which appeared in Another Time
W. H. Auden 1938
(1940), along with “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “The
Unknown Citizen,” “September 1, 1939,” and “antiheroic” elegies for Yeats and Freud, in which he argued that great deeds are performed
not by unique geniuses but by otherwise ordinary individuals. Auden’s poems from the
later 1930s evidence his many travels during a period of political turmoil. Continuing
to try to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent 6
months in 1938 visiting China during 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
emigrate to the US (Auden becoming an American citizen 7
years later). Auden’s move to America in 1939 was hotly
debated in Britain (even once in Parliament), with many treating
it as a betrayal, and with a decline in his reputation the role of
influential young poet passed as a consequence to Dylan
Thomas. Isherwood and Auden saw each other only
intermittently after the move, and Auden soon met the poet
Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next 2 years.
Auden & Isherwood ’38
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Kallman ended their sexual relationship in 1941 because he could not accept Auden’s
insistence on mutual fidelity, but they remained companions, sharing houses and
apartments from 1953 until Auden’s death.
In 1940, existential Christianity became a central element in Auden’s life; he joined
the Episcopal Church, influenced partly by the “saintly” Charles Williams and partly
by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr. In 1940–41 Auden lived at 7
Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, nicknamed “February House,” which he shared
with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others and which became a famous
center of artistic life. After teaching English for a year at the University of Michigan,
he was drafted into the US Army in August 1942 but rejected on medical grounds. He
taught at Swarthmore College in 1942–45, and as he became more comfortable with
religious themes, his verse became more open and relaxed. After a stint in Germany
after the European end of World War II, studying the effects of Allied bombing on
German morale—an experience that affected his postwar work as deeply as his visit to
Spain had affected him earlier—Auden settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance
writer, a lecturer, and a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American
colleges.
For the first part of his career—the English and the early American
phase—Auden was very much the poet of the Depression and Age of the Refugee,
preferring to confront modern problems directly rather than to filter them, as Eliot did,
through symbolic situations. By contrast, Auden’s poems from
the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less
dramatic manner and combined traditional forms and styles
with new, original ones. Gradually learning to clarify his
imagery and control his desire to shock, he produced in the
years around 1940 poems of finely discipline movement,
pellucid clarity, and deep yet unsentimental feeling. At the
same time he was moving away from his earlier Freudian and
Marxist diagnosis of modern ills to a more religious view of
personal responsibility and traditional value without, however,
amending what he had learned from modern psychology. But
W. H. Auden 1940s
Auden never lost his ear for popular speech or his ability to
combine elements from popular art with an extreme technical
formality; he was always the experimenter, bringing together particularly high artifice
and a colloquial tone. Thematically, he investigated the temptation to use people for
utilitarian ends rather than valuing them for themselves, along with the moral
obligation to make and keep commitments even while facing the temptation to break
them. He characterized the 1930s, on the verge of another world war, as “the age of
anxiety,” which struck a chord in readers as a timely treatment of the moral and
political issues that directly affected them.
Auden began in 1948 spending summers in Europe, first in Italy and then,
starting in 1958, in Kirchstetten, Austria, where he bought a farmhouse, becoming
emotional at owning a home for the first time. His next book Nones (1951), in which
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he once again combined the somber with the flippant, had a Mediterranean atmosphere
new to his work and a new theme: the “sacred importance” of the human body being
(in its breathing, sleeping, eating) continuous with nature, in contrast to the division
between humanity and nature he had emphasized in the
1930s. In 1955–56 he wrote a group of poems about
“history,” the term he used to differentiate unique humanchoice events from “nature,” that is, involuntary events
created by natural processes, statistics, and anonymous
forces. In 1956–61 Auden became Professor of Poetry at
Oxford University, which required him to give 3 major
lectures each year. This relatively light workload allowed
him to continue to winter in New York, where he now lived
in Manhattan’s East Village, and still summer in Europe. 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
W. H. Auden 1960s
conversation became repetitive, in marked contrast to the
witty and wide-ranging conversationalist of earlier days. In 1972, needing to be part of
a university community as a protection against loneliness, he moved his winter home
from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a
cottage. He continued to summer in Austria, dying in Vienna in September 1973, then
being buried in Kirchstetten.
Auden published some 400 poems, including 2 of book length, and more than
400 essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many
other subjects, his central themes being love, politics, citizenship, religion and
morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous,
impersonal world of nature. Possessing formidable
technique and an acute ear, his poetry is encyclopedic in
scope and method, ranging in style from obscure
20th-century modernism or a “Christmas Oratorio” in
Anglo-Saxon meters to pop-song clichés or lucid
traditional ballads and limericks. The poems in the last
phase of his career, such those in About the House (1967)
and City without Walls (1970), are noted for their lexical
range, humanitarian content, and an increasingly personal
tone that combined offhand informality with remarkable
technical skill, yet they often received mixed and
W. H. Auden 1970
unenthusiastic reviews. Growing increasingly hostile to
the modern world and skeptical of all remedies offered for
modern ills, Auden, instead, took refuge in love and friendship, particularly the kind
he shared with Kallmann, and in emotions grounded in an ever deepening and rarely
obtrusive religious feeling.
Auden’s stature in modern literature has always been disputed, with
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assessments ranging over almost the entire spectrum of opinion. When he prepared his
later collected editions, Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most
famous poems as “dishonest,” arguing that they expressed views he had never held or
used only because they would be rhetorically effective. Although an uneven poet, one
who in the opinion of some (including Philip Larkin and Randall
Jarrell) never quite fulfilled the enormous promise of his early
work, Auden is nevertheless now generally recognized as one of
the masters of 20 th -century English poetry, who combined lively
intelligence and immense craftsmanship. The detached, ironic
tone of Auden’s regular stanzas set the style for a whole
generation of poets. On the whole, unlike many modern poets,
Auden’s reputation did not decline appreciably after his death.
As scholar Bernard Bergonzi reminded people, “At a time of
world economic depression there was something reassuring in
Auden’s calm demonstration, mediated as much by style as by
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content, that reality was intelligible, and could be studied like a
map or a catalogue, or seen in temporal terms as an inexorable
historical process. . . . It was the last time that any British poet was to have such a
global influence on poetry in English.”
Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, the National Book Award in Poetry in
1956, and the National Medal for Literature in 1967. He was one of 3 candidates
recommended for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963 and one of 6 recommended for
it in 1964. A memorial stone in his honor was unveiled in Poets’ Corner, Westminster
Abbey in 1974. After his death, some of his more famous poems, such as “Funeral
Blues” became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through popular
films, broadcasts, and popular media.