W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden, born Wystan Hugh Auden on 21 February 1907 in York, England, was a British-American poet whose work ranged widely across love, politics, morals, religion, psychology, and culture. He grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional, middle-class family, the son of George Augustus Auden, a physician, and Constance Rosalie Auden, who had trained as a missionary nurse. The third of three sons, he was educated at English independent schools and later at Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied English after first arriving with a scholarship in biology.

Auden’s imagination was shaped early by strong and varied influences. His grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen, and he was raised in an Anglo-Catholic household whose services helped form his love of music and language. His father’s library fed a lifelong interest in psychoanalysis. He was fascinated by Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas, and at Oxford he encountered Old English poetry through the lectures of J. R. R. Tolkien. He first understood that poetry was his vocation at Gresham’s School, when his friend Robert Medley asked whether he wrote poems.

He came to wide public attention in 1930 with his first book, Poems, followed in 1932 by The Orators. In the 1930s he was often associated with Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, though the label “Auden Group” was misleading. Between 1935 and 1938 he wrote three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, work that helped build his reputation as a left-wing political writer. A stay in Berlin in 1928 and 1929 had brought him close to political and economic unrest, subjects that became central to parts of his writing.

In 1939 Auden moved to the United States, partly to escape that political reputation. He became an American citizen in 1946 while retaining his British citizenship. During the 1940s his work turned strongly toward religious themes, including the long poems For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror. His 1947 long poem The Age of Anxiety won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and its title became a popular phrase for describing the modern era. Other widely known poems include “Funeral Blues,” “September 1, 1939,” “The Shield of Achilles,” and “Horae Canonicae.”

Auden also taught, wrote essays and reviews, and worked in documentary film, poetic drama, and other forms of performance. He taught in American universities from 1941 to 1945 and later held occasional visiting professorships. From 1956 to 1961 he served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, where his lectures were popular with students and faculty and became the basis for his 1962 prose collection The Dyer’s Hand. Critical opinion on his work varied sharply, but after his death on 29 September 1973, his poems reached a wider public through films, broadcasts, and popular media. His words continue to draw readers because they meet private feeling and public crisis with formal skill, intelligence, and a searching human voice.