Christopher
Isherwood and W.H. Auden, photographed by Carl
Van Vechten, 1939
Wystan
Hugh Auden (February
21, 1907 – September
29, 1973) was
an English poet
and critic,
widely regarded as among the most influential and important writers
of the 20th
century. He spent the first part of his life in the United
Kingdom, but emigrated to the United
States in 1939,
becoming a U.S. citizen in 1946.
Contents
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Wystan
Hugh Auden was born in York
and spent his early childhood in Harborne,
Birmingham,
where his father Dr George Auden was the school medical officer for Birmingham
and Professor
of Public Health at the University
of Birmingham. From the age of eight Auden was sent away to boarding schools,
first in Surrey, and later Gresham's
School in Norfolk, but he returned to Birmingham for the holidays. He
was educated at Christ
Church, Oxford
University, but took only a third-class degree. After Oxford he went to live
for a year in Weimar
Berlin, in
whose tolerant atmosphere his homosexuality
could be more openly expressed.
On
returning to England, he taught at two boys' schools from 1930 to 1935. The most
important of these, and where he was happiest, was the Downs
School, near Great
Malvern. Here he spent three years and wrote some of his finest early love
poems: including "This lunar beauty"; "Lay your sleeping head, my
love"; "Fish in the unruffled lakes"; and "Out on the lawn I
lie in bed".
In
1935 Auden made a marriage
of convenience to Erika
Mann, lesbian daughter of the great German novelist Thomas
Mann, in order to provide her with a British passport to escape the Third
Reich. Although the "couple" never lived together, they remained
friends and never bothered to divorce. Auden and his then partner Christopher
Isherwood emigrated to the United
States in 1939.
This move away from England, just as the Second
World War was starting, was seen by many as a betrayal and his poetic
reputation suffered briefly as a result. Soon after arriving in New
York, he gave a public reading with Isherwood and Louis
MacNeice, at which he met the poet Chester
Kallman for the first time. Kallman was to be his lover and companion for
the rest of his life, though the relationship was often troubled.
Having
spent the war years in the United States, Auden became a naturalized
citizen in 1946,
but returned to Europe during the summers starting in 1948, first in Italy
then in Austria.
From 1956 to 1961, Auden was Professor
of Poetry at Oxford
University, a post which required him to give only three lectures each year,
so he spent only a few weeks at Oxford during his professorship. During the last
year of his life he moved back from New York to Oxford, and he died in Vienna
in 1973.
Auden
wrote a considerable body of 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 characterised by exceptional variety, ranging from such rigorous
traditional forms as the villanelle
to original yet intricate forms, as well as the technical and verbal skills
Auden displayed regardless of form. He was also partly responsible for
re-introducing Anglo-Saxon accentual
meter to English poetry. An area of controversy is the extent to which Auden
reworked poems in successive publications, and dropped several of his best-known
poems from "collected" editions because he no longer felt they were
honest or accurate. His literary
executor, Edward
Mendelson, makes the case in his introduction to Auden's Selected
Poems that this was in fact an affirmation of Auden's serious belief in the
power and importance of poetry. The Selected Poems include some of the
verse Auden rejected, and early versions of some which he later revised.
Before
he turned to Anglicanism
Auden took an active interest in left-wing
political controversies of his day and some of his greatest work reflects these
concerns, such as Spain, a poem on the Spanish
Civil War and September 1, 1939 on the outbreak of World
War II (both were later repudiated by Auden, and excluded from his Collected
Poems). Other memorable works include his Christmas
oratorio, For the Time Being, The
Unknown Citizen, Musée
des Beaux-Arts, and poems on the deaths of William
Butler Yeats and Sigmund
Freud. Auden's ironic love poem Funeral Blues (originally written to
be sung by a soprano friend of his, Hedli
Anderson) was movingly read in the 1994
film Four
Weddings and a Funeral. Before this, Auden's work was famously used in
the GPO
Film Unit's documentary
film Night
Mail, for which he wrote a verse commentary.
Auden
was often thought of as part of a group of like-minded writers including Edward
Upward, Christopher
Isherwood, Louis
MacNeice (with whom he collaborated on Letters from Iceland in 1936),
Cecil
Day-Lewis, and Stephen
Spender, although he himself stopped thinking of himself as part of a group
after about the age of 24. He also collaborated closely with composers, writing
an opera libretto
for Benjamin
Britten, and, in collaboration with Chester
Kallman, a libretto for Igor
Stravinsky and two libretti for Hans
Werner Henze. Auden was a frequent correspondent and longtime friend (although
they rarely saw each other) of J.R.R.
Tolkien. He was among the most prominent early critics to praise The
Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote in a 1971
letter, "I am... very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support
of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave
me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no
means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it."
Further Reading
Wikiquote
has a collection of quotations related to:
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden"
Categories:
1907
births | 1973
deaths | English
poets | English
dramatists and playwrights | English
literary critics | Gay
writers | Modernism
| Naturalized
citizens of the United States | Former
students of Christ Church, Oxford