W.H.
Auden
born Feb. 21, 1907, York, Yorkshire, Eng.
died Sept. 29, 1973, Vienna, Austria
English-born poet and man of letters who
achieved early fame in the 1930s as a hero
of the left during the Great Depression.
Most of his verse dramas of this period were
written in collaboration with Christopher
Isherwood. In 1939 Auden settled in the
United States, becoming a U.S. citizen.
Life.
In 1908 Auden’s family moved to
Birmingham, where his father became medical
officer and professor in the university.
Since the father was a distinguished
physician of broad scientific interests and
the mother had been a nurse, the atmosphere
of the home was more scientific than
literary. It was also devoutly
Anglo-Catholic, and Auden’s first religious
memories were of “exciting magical rites.”
The family name, spelled Audun, appears in
the Icelandic sagas, and Auden inherited
from his father a fascination with Iceland.
His education followed the standard
pattern for children of the middle and upper
classes. At 8 he was sent away to St.
Edmund’s preparatory school, in Surrey, and
at 13 to a public (private) school,
Gresham’s, at Holt, in Norfolk. Auden
intended to be a mining engineer and was
interested primarily in science; he
specialized in biology. By 1922 he had
discovered his vocation as a poet, and two
years later his first poem was published in
Public School Verse. In 1925 he entered the
University of Oxford (Christ Church), where
he established a formidable reputation as
poet and sage, having a strong influence on
such other literary intellectuals as C. Day
Lewis (named poet laureate in 1968), Louis
MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, who printed
by hand the first collection of Auden’s
poems in 1928. Though their names were often
linked with his as poets of the so-called
Auden generation, the notion of an “Auden
Group” dedicated to revolutionary politics
was largely a journalistic invention. Upon
graduating from Oxford in 1928, Auden,
offered a year abroad by his parents, chose
Berlin rather than the Paris by which the
previous literary generation had been
fascinated. He fell in love with the German
language and was influenced by its poetry,
cabaret songs, and plays, especially those
by Bertolt Brecht. He returned to become a
schoolmaster in Scotland and England for the
next five years.
In his Collected Shorter Poems Auden
divides his career into four periods. The
first extends from 1927, when he was still
an undergraduate, through The Orators of
1932. The “charade” Paid on Both Sides,
which along with Poems established Auden’s
reputation in 1930, best reveals the
imperfectly fused but fascinating amalgam of
material from the Icelandic sagas, Old
English poetry, public-school stories, Karl
Marx, Sigmund Freud and other psychologists,
and schoolboy humour that enters into all
these works. The poems are uneven and often
obscure, pulled in contrary directions by
the subjective impulse to fantasy, the
mythic and unconscious, and the objective
impulse to a diagnosis of the ills of
society and the psychological and moral
defects of the individuals who constitute
it. Though the social and political
implications of the poetry attracted most
attention, the psychological aspect is
primary. The notion of poetry as a kind of
therapy, performing a function somehow
analogous to the psychoanalytical, remains
fundamental in Auden.
The second period, 1933–38, is that in
which Auden was the hero of the left.
Continuing the analysis of the evils of
capitalist society, he also warned of the
rise of totalitarianism. In On This Island
(1937; in Britain, Look, Stranger!, 1936)
his verse became more open in texture and
accessible to a larger public. For the Group
Theatre, a society that put on experimental
and noncommercial plays in London, he wrote
first The Dance of Death (a musical
propaganda play) and then three plays in
collaboration with Christopher Isherwood,
Auden’s friend since preparatory school: The
Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F
6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). Auden
also wrote commentaries for documentary
films, including a classic of that genre,
Night Mail (1936); numerous essays and book
reviews; and reportage, most notably on a
trip to Iceland with MacNeice, described in
Letters from Iceland (1937), and a trip to
China with Isherwood that was the basis of
Journey to a War (1939). Auden visited Spain
briefly in 1937, his poem Spain (1937) being
the only immediate result; but the visit,
according to his later recollections, marked
the beginning both of his disillusion with
the left and of his return to Christianity.
In 1936 he married Erika Mann, the daughter
of the German novelist Thomas Mann, in order
to provide her with a British passport. When
he and Isherwood went to China, they crossed
the United States both ways, and on the
return journey they both decided to settle
there. In January 1939, both did so.
In the third period, 1939–46, Auden
became an American citizen and underwent
decisive changes in his religious and
intellectual perspective. Another Time
(1940) contains some of his best songs and
topical verse, and The Double Man
(containing “New Year Letter,” which
provided the title of the British edition;
1941) embodies his position on the verge of
commitment to Christianity. The beliefs and
attitudes that are basic to all of Auden’s
work after 1940 are defined in three long
poems: religious in the Christmas oratorio
For the Time Being (1944); aesthetic in the
same volume’s Sea and the Mirror (a
quasi-dramatic “commentary” on William
Shakespeare’s The Tempest); and
social-psychological in The Age of Anxiety
(1947), the “baroque eclogue” that won Auden
the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Auden wrote no
long poems after that.
The fourth period began in 1948, when
Auden established the pattern of leaving New
York City each year to spend the months from
April to October in Europe. From 1948 to
1957 his summer residence was the Italian
island of Ischia; in the latter year he
bought a farmhouse in Kirchstetten, Austria,
where he then spent his summers. In The
Shield of Achilles (1955), Homage to Clio
(1960), About the House (1965), and City
Without Walls (1969) are sequences of poems
arranged according to an external pattern
(canonical hours, types of landscape, rooms
of a house). With Chester Kallman, an
American poet and close friend who lived
with him for more than 20 years, he
rehabilitated the art of the opera libretto.
Their best-known collaborations are The
Rake’s Progress (1951), for Igor Stravinsky;
Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The
Bassarids (1966), for Hans Werner Henze; and
Love’s Labour’s Lost for Nicolas Nabokov.
They also edited An Elizabethan Song Book
(1956). In 1962 Auden published a volume of
criticism, The Dyer’s Hand, and in 1970 a
commonplace book, A Certain World. He spent
much time on editing and translating,
notably The Collected Poems of St. John
Perse (1972). In 1972 Auden transferred his
winter residence from New York City to
Oxford, where he was an honorary fellow at
Christ Church College. Of the numerous
honours conferred on Auden in this last
period, the Bollingen Prize (1953), the
National Book Award (1956), and the
professorship of poetry at Oxford (1956–61)
may be mentioned.
Assessment.
In the early 1930s W.H. Auden was
acclaimed prematurely by some as the
foremost poet then writing in English, on
the disputable ground that his poetry was
more relevant to contemporary social and
political realities than that of T.S. Eliot
and William Butler Yeats, who previously had
shared the summit. By the time of Eliot’s
death in 1965, however, a convincing case
could be made for the assertion that Auden
was indeed Eliot’s successor, as Eliot had
inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats
died in 1939.
Auden was, as a poet, far more copious
and varied than Eliot and far more uneven.
He tried to interpret the times, to diagnose
the ills of society and deal with
intellectual and moral problems of public
concern. But the need to express the inner
world of fantasy and dream was equally
apparent, and, hence, the poetry is
sometimes bewildering. If the poems, taken
individually, are often obscure—especially
the earlier ones—they create, when taken
together, a meaningful poetic cosmos with
symbolic landscapes and mythical characters
and situations. In his later years Auden
ordered the world of his poetry and made it
easier of access; he collected his poems,
revised them, and presented them
chronologically in two volumes: Collected
Shorter Poems 1927–57 (1967) and Collected
Longer Poems (1969).
Monroe K. Spears
Ed.
