Detengan los relojes wh auden biography

British-American poet (–)

Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February – 29 September ^[1]) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content.

Some of his best known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social themes, such as "September 1, " and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes, such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".^[2][3][4]

Auden was born in York and grew up in and neighboring Birmingham in a professional, middle-class family.

He attended various English independent (or public) schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. After a few months in Berlin in –29, he spent five years (–) training in British private preparatory schools.

In , he moved to the United States; he became an American citizen in , retaining his British citizenship. Auden taught from to in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the s.

Publicar un comentario. Funeral Blues. Evitad que el perro ladre, con un suculento hueso. Silenciad los pianos, y destemplad los tambores.

Auden came to wide widespread attention in with his first book, Poems; it was followed in by The Orators. Three plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood between and built his reputation as a left-wing political writer. Auden moved to the United States partly to escape this reputation, and his work in the s, including the long poems "For the Time Being" and "The Sea and the Mirror", focused on religious themes.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his long poem The Age of Anxiety, the title of which became a popular term describing the modern era.^[5] From to , he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford; his lectures were popular with students and faculty and served as the basis for his prose collection The Dyer's Hand.

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. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential.

Critical views on his work ranged from sharply contemptuous (treating him as a lesser figure than W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot) to strongly affirmative (as in Joseph Brodsky's statement that he had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century").

After his death, his poems became known to a much wider public through films, broadcasts, and popular media.

Life

Childhood

Auden was born at 54 Bootham, York, England, to George Augustus Auden (–), a physician, and Constance Rosalie Auden (née Bicknell; –), who had trained (but never served) as a missionary nurse.^[6] He was the third of three sons; the eldest, George Bernard Auden (–), became a farmer, while the second, John Bicknell Auden (–), became a geologist.^[7] The Audens were minor gentry with a strong clerical tradition, originally of Rowley Regis, later of Horninglow, Staffordshire.^[8]

Auden, whose grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen, grew up in an Anglo-Catholic domesticated that followed a "high" establish of Anglicanism, with doctrine and ritual resembling those of Catholicism.^[9][5] He traced his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood.^[10] He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas is evident in his work.^[11]

His family moved to Homer Road in Solihull, near Birmingham, in ,^[10] where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health.

Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays.^[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".^[13][14] Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his love for words had already begun.

He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do."^[15][16]

Education

Auden attended St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later famous in his own right as a novelist.^[17] At thirteen he went to Gresham's Institution in Holt, Norfolk; there, in , when his friend Robert Medley asked him if he wrote poetry, Auden first realised his vocation was to be a poet.^[9] Soon after, he "discover(ed) that he (had) ruined his faith" (through a progressive realisation that he had confused interest in religion, not through any decisive change of views).^[18] In school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in ,^[19] and Caliban in The Tempest in , his last year at Gresham's.^[20] A review of his performance as Katherina noted that despite a underprivileged wig, he had been proficient "to infuse considerable dignity into his passionate outbursts".^[21]

His first published poems appeared in the college magazine in ^[22] Auden later wrote a chapter on Gresham's for Graham Greene's The Aged School: Essays by Divers Hands ().^[23]

In he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology; he changed to English by his second year, and was introduced to Old English poetry through the lectures of J.

R. R. Tolkien. Friends he met at Oxford include Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender – Auden and these three were commonly though misleadingly identified in the s as the "Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views.

Auden left Oxford in with a third-class degree.^[9][10]

Auden was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in by his fellow student A. S. T. Fisher. For the next limited years Auden sent poems to Isherwood for comments and criticism; the two maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others.

In –39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.^[24]

From his Oxford years onward, Auden's friends uniformly described him as humorous, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more confidential settings he was diffident and shy except when certain of his welcome.

He was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while living amidst physical disorder.^[5]

Britain and Europe, –

In late Auden left Britain for nine months, going to Berlin, perhaps partly as an escape from English repressiveness.

In Berlin, he first experienced the political and economic unrest that became one of his primary subjects.^[10] Around the same moment, Stephen Spender privately printed a small pamphlet of Auden's Poems in an edition of about 45 copies, distributed among Auden's and Spender's friends and family; this edition is usually referred to as Poems [] to avoid confusion with Auden's commercially published volume.^[25][26]

On returning to Britain in he worked briefly as a tutor.

Auden was one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, established for his insightful and often political works. His life and works are the subject of a comprehensive biography, which delves into his personal life, his relationships, and the evolution of his writing over time. This article provides an overview of his life and works, emphasizing some of his most notable contributions to the literary earth. Wystan Hugh Auden, better famous as W.

In his first published book, Poems (), was accepted by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber, and the same firm remained the British publisher of all the books he published thereafter. In , he began five years as a schoolmaster in boys' schools: two years at the Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, Scotland, then three years at the Downs School in the Malvern Hills, where he was a much-loved teacher.^[9] At the Downs, in June , he experienced what he later described as a "Vision of Agape", while sitting with three fellow teachers at the school, when he suddenly found that he loved them for themselves, that their existence had infinite value for him; this experience, he said, later influenced his decision to return to the Anglican Church in ^[27]

During these years Auden's erotic interests focused, as he later said, on an idealised "Alter Ego"^[28] rather than on individual people.

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. He contrasted these relationships with what he later regarded as the "marriage" (his word) of equals that he began with Chester Kallman in , based on the unique individuality of both partners.^[29]

In Auden married Erika Mann (–), the lesbian novelist daughter of Thomas Mann when it became apparent that the Nazis were intending to strip her of her German citizenship.^[30] Mann had asked Christopher Isherwood if he would marry her so she could become a British citizen.

He declined but suggested she approach Auden, who readily agreed to a marriage of convenience.^[31] Mann and Auden never lived together, but remained on fine terms throughout their lives and were still married when Mann died in She left him a small bequest in her will.^[32][33] In , Auden introduced actress Therese Giehse, Mann's companion , to the writer John Hampson and they too married so that Giehse could leave Germany.^[32]

From until he left Britain initial in , Auden worked as freelance reviewer, essayist, and lecturer, first with the GPO Motion picture Unit, a documentary film-making branch of the post office, headed by John Grierson.

Through his work for the Film Unit in he met and collaborated with Benjamin Britten, with whom he also worked on plays, song cycles, and a libretto.^[34] Auden's plays in the s were performed by the Community Theatre, in productions that he supervised to varying degrees.^[10]

His labor now reflected his belief that any good artist must be "more than a bit of a reporting journalist".^[35] In , Auden spent three months in Iceland where he gathered material for a travel book Letters from Iceland (), written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice.

In , 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.^[36] He returned to England after a brief visit to the front at Sarineña.

His seven-week visit to Spain affected him deeply, and his social views grew more complex as he found political realities to be more ambiguous and troubling than he had imagined.^[29][9] Again attempting to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in visiting China amid the Sino-Japanese War, productive on their book Journey to a War ().

On their way back to England they stayed briefly in New York and decided to move to the United States. Auden spent late partly in England, partly in Brussels.^[9]

Many of Auden's poems during the s and after were inspired by unconsummated adore, and in the s he summarised his emotional life in a famous couplet: "If matching affection cannot be / Enable the more loving one be me" ("The More Loving One").

He had a gift for friendship and, starting in the late s, a strong want for the stability of marriage; in a letter to his friend James Stern he called marriage "the only subject."^[37] Throughout his life, Auden performed charitable acts, sometimes in public, as in his marriage of convenience to Erika Mann,^[9] but, especially in later years, more often in private.

He was embarrassed if they were publicly revealed, as when his gift to his friend Dorothy Day for the Catholic Worker movement was reported on the front page of The New York Times in ^[38]

United States and Europe, –

Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York City in January , entering on temporary visas.

Their departure from Britain was later seen by many as a betrayal, and Auden's reputation suffered.^[9] In April , Isherwood moved to California, and he and Auden saw each other only intermittently in later years.

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).^[39]

In Kallman ended their sexual relationship because he could not accept Auden's insistence on mutual fidelity,^[40] but he and Auden remained companions for the rest of Auden's being, sharing houses and apartments from until Auden's death.^[41] Auden consecrated both editions of his unhurried poetry (/50 and ) to Isherwood and Kallman.^[42]

In –41 Auden lived in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, that he shared with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others, which became a known centre of artistic life, nicknamed "February House".^[43] In , Auden joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at fifteen.

His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams,^[44] whom he had met in , and partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a main element in his life.^[45]

After Britain declared war on Germany in September , Auden told the British embassy in Washington that he would return to the UK if needed.

He was told that, among those his age (32), only qualified personnel were needed. In –42 he taught English at the University of Michigan. He was called for the draft in the United States Army in August , but was rejected on medical grounds. He had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for –43 but did not leverage it, choosing instead to coach at Swarthmore College in –^[9]

In mid, after the end of World War II in Europe, he was in Germany with the US Strategic Bombing Survey, studying the effects of Allied bombing on German morale, an experience that affected his postwar work as his visit to Spain had affected him earlier.^[42] 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.

In , he became a naturalised citizen of the US.^[9][10]

In Auden began spending his summers in Europe, together with Chester Kallman, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house. Starting in he began spending his summers in Kirchstetten, Austria, where he bought a farmhouse with the prize money of the Premio Feltrinelli awarded to him in ^[46] He said that he shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first time.^[9] His later poetry, mostly written in Austria, includes his sequence "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" about his Kirchstetten home.^[47] Auden's letters and papers sent to his friend the translator Stella Musulin (–), available online, provide insights into his Austrian years.^[48]

In –61 Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, where he was required to grant three lectures each year.

This fairly light workload allowed him to continue to spend winter in New York, where he lived at 77 St. Mark's Place in Manhattan's East Village, and to spend summer in Europe, spending only three weeks each year lecturing in Oxford.

He earned his income mostly from readings and lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker,The New York Review of Books, and other magazines.^[10]

In Kallman left the apartment he shared in New York with Auden, and lived during the winter in Athens while continuing to spend his summers with Auden in Austria.

Auden spent the winter of in Berlin through an artist-in-residence program of the Ford Foundation.^[49][50]

Following some years of lobbying by his ally David Luke, Auden's old college, Christ Church, in February offered him a cottage on its grounds to live in; he moved his books and other possessions from New York to Oxford in September ,^[51] while continuing to spend summers in Austria with Kallman.

He spent only one winter in Oxford before his death in

Auden died at 66 of heart failure at the Altenburgerhof Hotel in Vienna overnight on 28–29 September , a few hours after giving a reading of his poems for the Austrian Society for Literature at the Palais Pálffy.

He had intended to return to Oxford the following day. He was buried on 4 October in Kirchstetten, and a memorial stone was placed in Westminster Abbey in London a year later.^[52][53]

Work

See also: Bibliography of W.

H. Auden

Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopaedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroqueeclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters.^[54] The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.^[4][29]

He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects.

He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, and worked with a organization of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the s and with the New York Pro Musicaearly music group in the s and s.

About collaboration he wrote in "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy .&#;.&#;. than any sexual relations I have had."^[55]

Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later unhurried editions.

He wrote that he rejected poems that he set up "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective.^[56] His rejected poems involve "Spain" and "September 1, ".

His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Selected Poems that Auden's exercise reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it.^[57] (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and preceding texts of poems that he revised.)

Early work, –

Up to

Auden began writing poems in , at 15, mostly in the styles of 19th-century quixotic poets, especially Wordsworth, and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas Hardy.

At 18 he discovered T.&#;S. Eliot and adopted an extreme version of Eliot's style.

Detengan los relojes, descuelguen el teléfono, con un hueso jugoso eviten que el perro ladre, silencien los pianos y con un sordo timbal traigan el ataúd, dejen que los dolientes vengan. Dejen que los aviones nos sobrevuelen en círculos luctuosos garabateando en el cielo el mensaje Él se ha muerto.

He found his control voice at 20 when he wrote the first poem later included in his collected serve , "From the very first coming down".^[29] This and other poems of the late s tended to be in a clipped, elusive style that alluded to, but did not directly declare, their themes of loneliness and loss.

Twenty of these poems appeared in his first publication Poems (), a pamphlet hand-printed by Stephen Spender.^[58]

In he wrote his first dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides, subtitled "A Charade", which combined style and content from the Icelandic sagas with jokes from English university life.

This mixture of tragedy and farce, with a fantasy play-within-a-play, introduced the mixed styles and content of much of his later work.^[54] This drama and thirty short poems appeared in his first published novel Poems (, 2nd edition with seven poems replaced, ); the poems in the book were mostly lyrical and gnomic meditations on hoped-for or unconsummated adore and on themes of personal, social, and seasonal renewal; among these poems were "It was Easter as I walked", "Doom is dark", "Sir, no man's enemy", and "This lunar beauty".^[29]

A recurrent theme in these initial poems is the effect of "family ghosts", Auden's term for the powerful, unseen psychological effects of preceding generations on any individual life (and the title of a poem).

A parallel theme, present throughout his perform, is the contrast between hereditary evolution (unchosen and involuntary) and the psychological evolution of cultures and individuals (voluntary and deliberate even in its subconscious aspects).^[54][29]

–

Auden's next large-scale work was The Orators: An English Study (; revised editions, , ), in verse and prose, largely about hero-worship in personal and political life.

In his shorter poems, his style became more unlock and accessible, and the exuberant "Six Odes" in The Orators reflect his new interest in Robert Burns.^[54] 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.^[29] Around this time his main influences were Dante, William Langland, and Alexander Pope.^[59]

During these years much of his work expressed left-wing views, and he became widely known as a political poet although he was privately more ambivalent about revolutionary politics than many reviewers recognised,^[60] and Mendelson argues that he expounded political views partly out of a sense of moral duty and partly because it enhanced his reputation, and that he later regretted having done so.^[61] He generally wrote about revolutionary alter in terms of a "change of heart", a transformation of a society from a closed-off psychology of fear to an open psychology of love.^[5]

His verse drama The Dance of Death () was a political extravaganza in the style of a theatrical revue, which Auden later called "a nihilistic leg-pull."^[62] His next play The Dog Beneath the Skin (), written in collaboration with Isherwood, was similarly a quasi-Marxist updating of Gilbert and Sullivan in which the general idea of social transformation was more prominent than any specific political action or structure.^[54][29]

The Ascent of F6 (), another play written with Isherwood, was partly an anti-imperialist satire, partly (in the character of the self-destroying climber Michael Ransom) an examination of Auden's own motives in taking on a universal role as a political poet.^[29] This play included the first version of "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), written as a satiric eulogy for a politician; Auden later rewrote the poem as a "Cabaret Song" about lost love (written to be sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson, for whom he wrote many lyrics in the s).^[63] In , he worked briefly on documentary films with the GPO Film Unit, writing his famous verse commentary for Night Mail and lyrics for other films that were among his attempts in the s to create a widely usable, socially conscious art.^[54][29][63]

–

In Auden's publisher chose the title Look, Stranger! for a collection of political odes, love poems, comic songs, meditative lyrics, and a variety of intellectually intense but emotionally accessible verse; Auden hated the title and retitled the collection for the US edition On This Island.^[29] 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".^[54][29]

Auden was now arguing that an artist should be a kind of reporter, and he put this view into practice in Letters from Iceland () a travel novel in prose and verse written with Louis MacNeice, which included his long social, literary, and autobiographical commentary "Letter to Lord Byron".^[64] In , after monitoring the Spanish Civil War he wrote a politically engaged tract poem Spain (); he later discarded it from his poised works.

Journey to a War () a travel book in prose and verse, was written with Isherwood after their call on to the Sino-Japanese War.^[64] Auden's last collaboration with Isherwood was their third play, On the Frontier, an anti-war satire written in Broadway and West Finish styles.^[29][10]

Auden's shorter poems now engaged with the fragility and transience of personal love ("Danse Macabre", "The Dream", "Lay your sleeping head"), a subject he treated with ironic wit in his "Four Cabaret Songs for Lose Hedli Anderson" (which included "Tell Me the Truth About Love" and the revised version of "Funeral Blues"), and also the corrupting effect of public and official culture on individual lives ("Casino", "School Children", "Dover").^[54][29] In , he wrote a series of dark, ironic ballads about individual failure ("Miss Gee", "James Honeyman", "Victor").

All these appeared in Another Time (), together with poems including "Dover", "As He Is", and "Musée des Beaux Arts" (all of which were written before he moved to America in ), and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "The Unknown Citizen", "Law Like Love", "September 1, ", and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (all written in America).^[54]

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 mimic, 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.^[29]

Middle period, –

–

In Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year Letter", which appeared with miscellaneous notes and other poems in The Double Man ().

At the period of his return to the Anglican Communion he began writing abstract verse on theological themes, such as "Canzone" and "Kairos and Logos". Around , as he became more comfortable with religious themes, his verse became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly used the syllabic verse he had learned from the poetry of Marianne Moore.^[42]

Auden's work in this era addresses the artist's temptation to exploit other persons as material for his art rather than valuing them for themselves ("Prospero to Ariel") and the corresponding moral obligation to make and preserve commitments while recognising the temptation to break them ("In Sickness and Health").^[42][54] From through he worked mostly on three distant poems in dramatic form, each differing from the others in form and content: "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest" (both published in For the Time Being, ), and The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (published separately in ).^[42] The first two, with Auden's other new poems from to , were included in his first collected edition, The Collected Poetry of W.&#;H.

Auden (), with most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions.^[54]

–

After completing The Age of Anxiety in he focused again on shorter poems, notably "A Walk After Dark", "The Adore Feast", and "The Fall of Rome".^[42] Many of these evoked the Italian village where he spent his summers between and , and his next manual, Nones (), had a Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work.^[65] A new theme was the "sacred importance" of the human body^[66] in its ordinary aspect (breathing, sleeping, eating) and the continuity with nature that the body made possible (in contrast to the division between humanity and nature that he had emphasised in the s);^[65] his poems on these themes included "In Praise of Limestone" () and "Memorial for the City" ().^[54][42] In , Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, and later collaborated on two libretti for operas by Hans Werner Henze.^[9][67]

Auden's first separate prose book was The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (), based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature.^[68] Between and he worked on a sequence of seven Good Friday poems, titled "Horae Canonicae", an encyclopaedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history, focused on the irreversible act of murder; the poem was also a study in cyclical and progressive ideas of time.

While writing this, he also wrote "Bucolics", a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to world. Both sequences appeared in his next book, The Shield of Achilles (), with other concise poems, including the book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier".^[54][42]

In –56 Auden wrote a group of poems about "history", the designation he used to mean the set of unique events made by human choices, as opposed to "nature", the set of involuntary events created by innate processes, statistics, and anonymous forces such as crowds.

Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in toneformand content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as " Funeral Blues "; on political and social themes, such as " September 1, " and " The Shield of Achilles "; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety ; and on religious themes, such as " For the Time Being " and " Horae Canonicae ". Auden was born in York and grew up in and adjacent Birmingham in a professional, middle-class family. He attended various English independent or public schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford.

These poems included "T the Great", "The Maker", and the title poem of his next collection Homage to Clio ().^[54][42]

Later work, –

In the tardy s Auden's style became less rhetorical while its range of styles increased.

In , having moved his summer home from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno"; other poems from this period contain "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 intuition.

These and other poems, including his –66 poems about history, appeared in Homage to Clio ().^[54][42] His prose book The Dyer's Hand () gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in –61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mids.^[42]

Among the new styles and forms in Auden's later work were the haiku and tanka that he began writing after rendering the haiku and other verse in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings.^[42] A sequence of fifteen poems about his house in Austria, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" (written in various styles that included an imitation of William Carlos Williams) appeared in About the House (), together with other poems that included his reflection on his lecture tours, "On the Circuit".^[54] In the late s he wrote some of his most vigorous poems, including "River Profile" and two poems that looked back over his animation, "Prologue at Sixty" and "Forty Years On".

All these appeared in City Without Walls (). His lifelong passion for Icelandic legend culminated in his verse translation of The Elder Edda ().^[54][42] Among his later themes was the "religionless Christianity" he learned partly from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the dedicatee of his poem "Friday's Child".^[69]

A Certain World: A Commonplace Book () was a kind of self-portrait made up of favourite quotations with commentary, arranged in alphabetical order by subject.^[70] His last prose manual was a selection of essays and reviews, Forewords and Afterwords ().^[9] His last books of verse, Epistle to a Godson () and the unfinished Thank You, Fog (published posthumously, ) include reflective poems about language ("Natural Linguistics", "Aubade"), philosophy and science ("No, Plato, No", "Unpredictable but Providential"), and his control aging ("A New Year Greeting", "Talking to Myself"—which he devoted to his friend Oliver Sacks,^[71][72] "A Lullaby" ["The din of work is subdued"]).

His last completed poem was "Archaeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later years.^[42]

Reputation and influence

Auden's stature in new literature has been contested. Probably the most common critical view from the s onward ranked him as the last and least of the three major twentieth-century poets of the UK or Ireland—behind Yeats and Eliot—while a minority view, more prominent in recent years, ranks him as the highest of the three.^[73] 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";^[74] and Harold Bloom, who wrote "Close thy Auden, open thy [Wallace] Stevens,"^[75] to the obituarist in The Times, who wrote: "W.H.

Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry emerges as its undisputed master."^[76]Joseph Brodsky wrote that Auden had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century".^[77]

Critical estimates were divided from the start.

Reviewing Auden's first book, Poems (), Naomi Mitchison wrote "If this is really only the beginning, we have perhaps a master to look forward to."^[78] But John Sparrow, recalling Mitchison's comment in , dismissed Auden's early labor as "a monument to the misguided aims that prevail among contemporary poets, and the proof that he is being hailed as 'a master' shows how criticism is helping poetry on the downward path."^[79]

Auden's clipped, satiric, and ironic style in the s was widely imitated by younger poets such as Charles Madge, who wrote in a poem "there waited for me in the summer morning / Auden fiercely.

I read, shuddered, and knew."^[80] He was widely described as the leader of an "Auden group" that comprised his friends Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice.^[81] The four were mocked by the poet Roy Campbell as if they were a single undifferentiated poet named "Macspaunday."^[82] Auden's propagandistic poetic plays, including The Pup Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6, and his political poems such as "Spain" gave him the reputation as a political poet writing in a progressive and accessible voice, in contrast to Eliot; but this political stance provoked opposite opinions, such as that of Austin Clarke who called Auden's work "liberal, democratic, and humane",^[83] and John Drummond, who wrote that Auden misused a "characteristic and popularizing trick, the generalized image", to present ostensibly left-wing views that were in proof "confined to bourgeois experience."^[84]

Auden's departure for America in was debated in Britain (once even in Parliament), with some seeing his emigration as a betrayal.

Defenders of Auden such as Geoffrey Grigson, in an introduction to a anthology of modern poetry, wrote that Auden "arches over all". His stature was suggested by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe () and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes ().^[4]

In the US, starting in the late s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden's regular stanzas became influential; John Ashbery recalled that in the s Auden "was the modern poet".^[76] Auden's formal influences were so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Defeat Generation was partly a reaction against his influence.

From the s through the s, many critics lamented that Auden's labor had declined from its earlier promise; Randall Jarrell wrote a series of essays making a case against Auden's later work,^[85] and Philip Larkin's "What's Develop of Wystan?" () had a wide impact.^[76][86]

The first full-length examine of Auden was Richard Hoggart's Auden: An Introductory Essay (), which concluded that "Auden's labor, then, is a civilising force."^[87] It was followed by Joseph Warren Beach's The Making of the Auden Canon (), a disapproving account of Auden's revisions of his earlier work.^[88] The first systematic critical account was Monroe K.

Spears' The Poetry of W.&#;H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (), "written out of the conviction that Auden's poetry can offer the reader business, instruction, intellectual excitement, and a prodigal variety of aesthetic pleasures, all in a generous abundance that is unique in our time."^[89]

Auden was one of three candidates recommended by the Nobel Committee to the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize in Literature in ^[90] and ^[91] and six recommended for the prize.^[92] By the time of his death in he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman, and a memorial stone for him was placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey in ^[93] The Encyclopædia Britannica writes that "by the time of Eliot's death in a convincing case could be made for the statement that Auden was indeed Eliot's successor, as Eliot had inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats died in "^[94] With some exceptions, British critics tended to treat his early labor as his best, while American critics tended to favour his middle and later work.^[95][96]

Another community of critics and poets has maintained that unlike other latest poets, Auden's reputation did not decline after his death, and the influence of his later writing was especially strong on younger American poets including John Ashbery, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, and Maxine Kumin.^[97] Typical later evaluations describe him as "arguably the [20th] century's greatest poet" (Peter Parker and Frank Kermode),^[98] who "now clearly seems the greatest poet in English since Tennyson" (Philip Hensher).^[99]

Auden became a close friend of neurologist Oliver Sacks and after publication of Sacks's first book Migraine, in , his review encouraged Sacks to adapt his writing approach to "be metaphorical, be unreal, be whatever you need."^[]

Public recognition of Auden's work sharply increased after his "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") was interpret aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (); subsequently, a pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold more than , copies.

An excerpt from his poem "As I walked out one evening" was recited in the film Before Sunrise ().^[] After 11 September , his poem "September 1, " was widely circulated and frequently broadcast.^[76] Universal readings and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in marked his centenary year.^[]

Overall Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, cherish, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content.^{[29][54][77][]}

Memorial stones and plaques commemorating Auden include those in Westminster Abbey; at his birthplace at 55 Bootham, York;^[] near his abode on Lordswood Road, Birmingham;^[] in the chapel of Christ Church, Oxford; on the site of his apartment at 1 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn Heights; at his apartment in 77 St.

Marks Place, New York (damaged and now removed);^[] at the site of his death at Walfischgasse 5 in Vienna;^[] and in the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco.^[] In his residence in Kirchstetten, his study is open to the public upon request.^[]

In , newly declassified UK government files revealed that Auden was considered as a candidate to be the new Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in following the death of John Masefield.

He was rejected due to having taken American citizenship.^[]

Published works

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, spot W.

H. Auden bibliography. Dates refer to first publication or first performance, not of composition.

In the list below, works reprinted in the Complete Works of W.&#;H. Auden are indicated by footnote references.

Books

• Poems (London, ; second edn., seven poems substituted, London, ; includes poems and Paid on Both Sides: A Charade^[63]) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood).
• The Orators: An English Study (London, , verse and prose; slightly revised edn., London, ; revised edn.

  with new preface, London, ; New York ) (dedicated to Stephen Spender).

• The Twirl of Death (London, , play)^[63] (dedicated to Robert Medley and Rupert Doone).
• Poems (New York, ; contains Poems [ edition], The Orators [ edition], and The Dance of Death).
• The Dog Beneath the Skin (London, New York, ; play, with Christopher Isherwood)^[63] (dedicated to Robert Moody).
• The Ascent of F6 (London, ; 2nd edn., ; New York, ; play, with Christopher Isherwood)^[63] (dedicated to John Bicknell Auden).
• Look, Stranger! (London, , poems; US edn., On This Island, New York, ) (dedicated to Erika Mann)
• Letters from Iceland (London, New York, ; verse and prose, with Louis MacNeice)^[64] (dedicated to George Augustus Auden).
• On the Frontier (London, ; New York ; compete, with Christopher Isherwood)^[63] (dedicated to Benjamin Britten).
• Journey to a War (London, New York, ; verse and prose, with Christopher Isherwood)^[64] (dedicated to E.

  M. Forster).

• Another Time (London, New York ; poetry) (dedicated to Chester Kallman).
• The Double Man (New York, , poems; UK edn., New Year Letter, London, ) (Dedicated to Elizabeth Mayer).
• For the Time Being (New York, ; London, ; two long poems: "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest", committed to James and Tania Stern, and "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", in memoriam Constance Rosalie Auden [Auden's mother]).
• The Collected Poetry of W.

  H. Auden (New York, ; includes new poems) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman). Occupied text.^[]

• The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (New York, ; London, ; verse; won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) (dedicated to John Betjeman).
• Collected Shorter Poems, – (London, ; similar to Collected Poetry) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
• The Enchafèd Flood (New York, ; London, ; prose) (dedicated to Alan Ansen).^[]
• Nones (New York, ; London, ; poems) (dedicated to Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr)
• The Shield of Achilles (New York, London, ; poems) (won the National Guide Award for Poetry)^[] (dedicated to Lincoln and Fidelma Kirstein).
• Homage to Clio (New York, London, ; poems) (dedicated to E.

  R. and A. E. Dodds).

• The Dyer's Hand (New York, ; London, ; essays) (dedicated to Nevill Coghill).^[]
• About the House (New York, London, ; poems) (dedicated to Edmund and Elena Wilson).
• Collected Shorter Poems – (London, ; Novel York, ) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
• Collected Longer Poems (London, ; New York, ).
• Secondary Worlds (London, New York, ; prose) (dedicated to Valerie Eliot).^[]
• City Without Walls and Other Poems (London, New York, ) (dedicated to Peter Heyworth).
• A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (New York, London, ; quotations with commentary) (dedicated to Geoffrey Grigson).^[]
• Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems (London, New York, ) (dedicated to Orlan Fox).
• Forewords and Afterwords (New York, London, ; essays) (dedicated to Hannah Arendt).
• Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (London, New York, ) (dedicated to Michael and Marny Yates).

Film scripts and opera libretti

• Coal Face (, closing chorus for GPO Motion picture Unit documentary).^[63]
• Night Mail (, narrative for GPO Film Unit documentary, not published separately except as a programme note).^[63]
• Paul Bunyan (, libretto for operetta by Benjamin Britten; not published until ).^[67]
• The Rake's Progress (, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Igor Stravinsky).^[67]
• Elegy for Juvenile Lovers (, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Hans Werner Henze).^[67]
• The Bassarids (, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Hans Werner Henze based on The Bacchae of Euripides).^[67]
• Runner (, documentary motion picture narrative for National Film Board of Canada)^[67]
• Love's Labour's Lost (, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Nicolas Nabokov, based on Shakespeare's play).^[67]

Musical collaborations

References

Citations