W. H. Auden (England / USA)
1907-1973
Born on February 21, 1907 in York,
Wystan Hugh Auden grew up in a professional middle-class family near
Birmingham. His father, George Augustus Auden, was a physician, and his mother
Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden had trained as a missionary nurse. His grandfathers
were both Church of England clergymen, and Auden was raised, accordingly, to
follow the “High” Anglican traditions, and throughout his life the poet traced
his love of language and music to his childhood church services.
In 1908 his father was appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer
of Public Health near Birmingham. At age eight Auden began attending a series
of boarding schools, returning to his family only at holidays. At his first
boarding school, St. Edmund’s in Hindhead, Surrey, Auden met his lifelong
friend, Christopher Isherwood. At Gresham’s School, at the age of thirteen,
Auden discovered his interest in poetry, soon after, having a crisis of faith.
At school he also performed in productions of Shakespeare, publishing his first
poems in the school magazine in 1923.
Until fifteen years of age, Auden still planned to become a mining
engineer, but his love of language dominated. As Auden would describe it later:
“words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually
more than a living person can do.”
In 1926 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology,
but changing to English his second year. At Oxford Auden met Cecil Day Lewis,
Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, as well as meeting up again with his
childhood friend, Isherwood. The four writers would often be associated later
with what would be called “the Auden Group,” in part because of their similar
left-wing political views. Auden left Oxford in 1928, with a third-class
degree.
His relationship with Isherwood, however, continued to develop,
Isherwood serving both as a kind of literary mentor, and later, in the 1930s, as
a lover. In 1935-1939 the two collaborated on three plays—The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6, and On the Frontier—and a travel book.
In 1928 Auden left England for nine months, traveling to Berlin, in part
as a response against what he saw as the repressiveness of British society and
the disdain of his work by some English poets. There he experienced the
political and economic unrest that would become one of his central themes
throughout his life.
Returning to England, he worked as tutor before publishing his first
book, Poems (1930), accepted by T. S.
Eliot at Faber and Faber, who would ultimately publish nearly all of Auden’s
works. In 1930 he also began teaching at boys’ schools, first at the Larchfield
Academy in Scotland and later at The Downs School, where experienced a feeling
a described as a “Vision of Agape,” where he realized a deep love for his
fellow teachers, leading him to return to the Anglican Church in 1940.
Throughout these years, Auden had various transient sexual relations
with both younger and less intelligent figures, but was unable to form any
serious relationships until meeting Chester Kallman in 1939.
Throughout the late 1930 the poet worked as a reviewer, essayist, and
lecturer for G.P.O, Film Unit, a branch of the British Post Office. Through
that experience he met the composer Benjamin Britten, with whom he collaborated
on plays, song cycles, and a libretto.
In 1936 he spent three months in Iceland—a country which had long
fascinated Auden’s imagination—which produced the travel book, Letters from Iceland (1930), co-written
by Louis MacNeice. Now committed to an activist journalism as opposed to a
“reporting” one, Auden traveled to Spain with the intention of driving an
ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. He was instead put to work
as a broadcasting propagandist, traveling to the front. Highly effected by the
complexity of issues and social views, the seven-week visit to Spain affected
him for the rest of his life. In 1938, he and Isherwood spent six months
involved in the Sino-Japanese War, working together on the book, Journey to a War. On the return home,
the two stopped in New York City, and determined to move to the United States.
They sailed to New York, on temporary visas, in January 1939, their
abandonment of England creating even further hostility to Auden’s work by the
British poetic scene. In 1939, however, Isherwood moved to California, and
Auden and he saw each other only occasionally over the years following.
At this same time Auden met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his
lover, their relationship being described by Auden as a “marriage.” That
relationship ended in 1941, however, because of Auden’s insistence upon a
mutually faithful relationship; yet the two remained companions for the rest of
Auden’s life, sharing houses and apartments.
In 1940-41 the two lived at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights,
sharing a house with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Jane and Paul Bowles,
and several others, a house that became known later as “February House.”
When Britain declared war on Germany, Auden offered to return to
England, but was told by the British embassy that, because of his age, he was
not needed. In 1941-42 he taught English at the University of Michigan. In
August of 1942 he was drafted into the US Army, but was rejected on medical grounds.
Although he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the following year, he chose
instead to teach at Swarthmore College, where he continued until 1945.
With the end of World War II in Europe, he was asked to join the U.S.
Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany to determine the effects of Allied bombings
on German morale, a visit which again deeply affected him. Upon returning to
the US, he joined the faculty of The New School for Social Research, as well as
lecturing at Bennington, Smith, and US colleges. Auden became a naturalized
citizen of the United States in 1946.
As the years passed, Auden was drawn to Roman Catholicism, particularly
through the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Beginning in 1948, first in Ischia,
Italy and a decade later, in Kirchstetten, Austria, Auden summered in Europe,
buying a farmhouse in Austria.
From 1956-61, Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University,
requiring him to present three lectures each year. But he continued to winter
in New York, living now on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village of Manhattan,
while summering in Europe. Auden died in Vienna in 1973 and was buried in his
beloved Kirchstetten.
BOOKS OF POETRY
Poems
(London:
Faber and Faber, 1930/ reprinted 1933); The
Orators: An English Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1932/reprinted 1966); Look Stranger (London: Faber and Faber,
1936; published as On This Island (New
York: Random House, 1937); Letters from
Iceland (prose and poetry, with Louis MacNeice) (London: Faber and Faber,
1937/New York: Random House, 1937); Journey
to the War (prose and poetry, with Christopher Isherwood) (London: Faber and
Faber, 1939/New York: Random House, 1939); Another
Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1940/New York: Random House, 1940); The Double Man (London: Faber and Faber,
1941/New York: Random House, 1941); For
the Time Being (New York: Random House, 1944/London: Faber and Faber,
1945); The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden
(New York: Random House, 1945); The
Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (New York: Random House, 1947/London:
Faber and Faber, 1948); Collected Shorter
Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1950); Nones
(New York: Random House, 1951/London: Faber and Faber, 1952); The Shield of Achilles (New York: Random
House, 1955/London: Faber and Faber, 1955); Homage
to Clio (London: Faber and Faber, 1960/New York: Random house, 1960); About the House (London: Faber and Faber,
1965/New York: Random House, 1965); Collected
Longer Poems (London: Faber, 1968/New York: Random House, 1969); City without Walls and Other Poems (London:
Faber, 1969/New York: Random House, 1969); Epistle
to a Godson and Other Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1972/New York: Random
House, 1972); Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (London:
Faber and Faber, 1974/New York: Random House, 1974); Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1976/New York: Random
House, 1976/reprinted New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928 (London: Faber and Faber,
1994/Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994); Poems (New York: Knopf, 1995); Collected Poems (New York: Modern
Library, 2007); Selected Poems (New
York: Vintage International, 2007)
For a selection of Auden poems, go here:
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