[32], In 1941 Kallman ended their sexual relationship because he could not accept Auden's insistence on mutual fidelity,[33] but he and Auden remained companions for the rest of Auden's life, sharing houses and apartments from 1953 until Auden's death. [10] He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas is evident in his work. W. [3], In the US, starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden's regular stanzas became influential; John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s Auden "was the modern poet". It describes, disturbingly, through the form of a dystopian report, the life of a nameless man. Raised by a physician father and a strict, Anglican mother, Auden pursued science and engineering at Oxford University before finding his calling to write and switching his major to English. It was during this time that Auden would embark on the most important personal relationship of his life with the poet Chester Kallman whom he would later describe being “married” to. [91] In his house in Kirchstetten, his study is open to the public upon request.[92]. [22], In 1925 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology; he switched to English by his second year, and was introduced to Old English poetry through the lectures of J. R. R. Tolkien. [35] Many of these evoked the Italian village where he spent his summers between 1948–57, and his next book, Nones (1951), had a Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work. Auden. [82] Typical later evaluations describe him as "arguably the [20th] century's greatest poet" (Peter Parker and Frank Kermode),[83] who "now clearly seems the greatest poet in English since Tennyson" (Philip Hensher). He worked as a reviewer, lecturer, and essayist. In the list below, works reprinted in the Complete Works of W. H. Auden are indicated by footnote references. [9][10], In 1948, Auden began spending his summers in Europe, together with Chester Kallman, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house. In 1941, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship which he did not use, he decided instead to teach at Swarthmore College. ‘The Unknown Citizen’ is one of W.H. William Howard Taft, the 27th president of the United States, fulfilled a lifelong dream when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court, becoming the only person to have served as both a U.S. chief justice and president. It was while he was in school at St. Edmunds that he met Christopher Isherwood, a boy who would grow up into a truly prolific novelist, and a life long friend. He began university in 1925 at Christ Church, Oxford where he initially intended to study biology. Auden collected hats, at least as a younger man (he subsequently renounced them). [58] Opinions have ranged from those of Hugh MacDiarmid, who called him "a complete wash-out"; F. R. Leavis, who wrote that Auden's ironic style was "self-defensive, self-indulgent or merely irresponsible";[59] and Harold Bloom, who wrote "Close thy Auden, open thy [Wallace] Stevens,"[60] to the obituarist in The Times, who wrote: "W.H. In 1937 he went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but was put to work writing propaganda at the Republican press and propaganda office, where he felt useless and left after a week. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do. While in school he formed a number of close friendships with other writers. Antonio Vivaldi was a 17th and 18th century composer who’s become one of the most renowned figures in European classical music. Auden continued to travel and spent time in China where he worked on his book, Journey to a War, published in 1939. D.H. Lawrence is best known for his infamous novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover,' which was banned in the United States until 1959. Three plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood between 1935 and 1938 built his reputation as a left-wing political writer. [61][71], After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues", "Musée 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. In 1972, Auden moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage, while he continued to spend summers in Austria. Auden eventually became an American citizen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams,[37] whom he had met in 1937, and partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life. "[79] 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. W.H. W.H. After 11 September 2001 his 1939 poem "September 1, 1939" was widely circulated and frequently broadcast. [41], The elegies for Yeats and Freud are partly anti-heroic statements, 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. As a boy at his church and as a young man he was educated at St. Edmund’s preparatory school. W.H. In 1935–39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book. [29] He returned to England after a brief visit to the front at Sarineña. Additionally, he traveled to Spain and served in the Spanish Civil war broadcasting propaganda. From 1947 to 1957 he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia; from 1958 until the end of his life he wintered in New York (in Oxford in 1972–73) and summered in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria. Pablo Neruda was a Nobel Prize–winning Chilean poet who was once called "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.". [73] The first systematic critical account was Monroe K. Spears' The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (1963), "written out of the conviction that Auden's poetry can offer the reader entertainment, instruction, intellectual excitement, and a prodigal variety of aesthetic pleasures, all in a generous abundance that is unique in our time. [5] He was the third of three sons; the eldest, George Bernard Auden (1900–1978), became a farmer, while the second, John Bicknell Auden (1903–1991), became a geologist. 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. Columbia University. 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. "[42], Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. [6] The Audens were minor gentry with a strong clerical tradition, originally of Rowley Regis, later of Horninglow, Staffordshire. George Auden, W.H. Born in this day in 1907, Auden’s literary contributions are vast and myriad. [41] 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 Hölderlin. [41], 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". It was also at St. Edmunds that Auden’s first poems were published. Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Eliot, Auden published another collection of the same name (Poems) that featured different content. He was one of three sons and would grow up strongly influenced by his parent’s belief systems and careers. He was born in York and grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family. [18] In school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922,[19] and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his last year at Gresham's. [38], 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. W.H. With his health waning, Auden left America in 1972 and moved back to Oxford. [40] He was buried in Kirchstetten. However, the two maintained their friendship, and from 1947 until Auden's death they lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relationship, often collaborating on opera libretti such as that of The Rake's Progress, to music by Igor Stravinsky. Auden was 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. [26] Among the poems included in the book are "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". 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. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! He developed an obsession with Christianity and theology; topics that made their way into Auden’s writing. He studied poems by writers such as Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and Gerald Manley Hopkins. [41][35] His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956–61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s. —W. [35] 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. More so, Auden was lauded for his chameleon-like ability to write poems in almost every verse form. 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 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). During the 1893 Columbian Exposition, he lured victims into his elaborate 'Murder Castle.'. "[61] Joseph Brodsky wrote that Auden had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century". [26] 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. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . His final works were, Epistle to a Godson, and the sadly unfinished, Thank You, Fog. [12] 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". His relationships (and his unsuccessful courtships) tended to be unequal either in age or intelligence; his sexual relations were transient, although some evolved into long friendships. William Penn was an English Quaker best known for founding the colony of Pennsylvania as a place for religious freedom in America. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1994). [26][9] Again attempting to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 visiting China amid the Sino-Japanese War, working on their book Journey to a War (1939). Wyston Hugh Auden was born in February of 1907, in York, England.

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