W.H. Auden

21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973. Influential Anglo-American poet and a left-wing political writer.

Biography:

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York. From 1915 to 1920 he was a boarder at St Edmund's Preparatory School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, a fellow pupil who became a lifelong friend and, during the 1930s, a lover. It was during his stay at Gresham's School, Holt, from 1920 to 1925 that he started to write poetry for the first time. In 1925 he became engaged to a nurse in Birmingham. However, the engagement was only brief and very obscure. In the same year he accompanied his father to Europe. After his return Auden began his studies of Natural Sciences, Politics, Philosophy, Economics and English at Christchurch, Oxford, graduating with a Third Class degree. During his undergraduate studies he got into contact with various men who would become famous intellectuals later on in life such as Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Bill McElwee.

In 1926 Auden was introduced to modernist writing by a fellow student. As a result, he became fascinated by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land as well as writings by Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. Auden's early poems were published privately by Stephen Spender in 1928, the very same year that Auden spent in Berlin together with Isherwood, where he encountered left-wing politics for the first time, a circumstance which influenced his political writing.

After his return Auden took to teaching in London. In 1930 T.S. Eliot initiated the publication of Auden's Paid on Both Sides and of Poems respectively. The former, a verse play, was regarded by Eliot as “a brilliant piece of work” with Auden being “the best poet that I have discovered in several years” (qtd. in Fuller, 13). The Orators: An English Study was published in the same year and can be seen as “a surrealist anatomy of a country in crisis” (Fuller, 51). It was the latter that boosted Auden's early reputation with John Hayward writing in the Criterion: “I have no doubt that it is the most valuable contribution to English poetry since The Waste Land” (Fuller, 51). In 1935 Auden married Erika Mann, an anti-Nazi and the lesbian daughter of Thomas Mann, in order to gain British citizenship and a passport to travel (1935 the German officials had declared her no longer a German = Entzug der Staatsbürgerschaft). Two years later, Auden spent three months in Valencia, Spain (from January till March 1937), where he broadcast for the embattled Republic.

In 1939 he moved to the United States together with Isherwood where he worked as script-writer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood. His decision to leave Britain behind was partly a result of the uneasiness he felt over being “the cultural leader of young [leftist] English partisans” (Davenport-Hines qtd. in Smith, 19). A year later he again started teaching; this time at the New School for Social Research, New York. In the subsequent years Auden taught at many other colleges and universities including Michigan University (1941), Bennington College (1946), Barnard College (1947) and Oxford University (1956) among others. In 1946 he finally became a citizen of the US. Wystan Hugh Auden died of a heart attack on 29 September 1973 in a hotel in Vienna. He regularly spent time in Kirchstätten (Niederösterreich), where he is also buried.

Works:

In his works Auden drew ideas from other poets as well as from novelists, historians, theologians, psychologists, philosophers, political scientists and anthropologists. Moreover, he was highly influenced by psychoanalytical and Marxist theories. Yet, Auden's devotion to Marxism “was never wholehearted and frequently seemed forced and false” (Wright, 58).

During his early years as a poet and writer Auden was numbered among the so-called Pylon Poets, a group of mostly young intellectuals who celebrated new technology. However, Auden was also profoundly committed to political writing with many critical or terrifying concerns about political injustice and human pain being spoken about in several of his works. Consequently, he soon became a spokesperson for many thinking dissenters.

Sources:

Fuller, John. A Reader's Guide to W.H. Auden. Thames and Hudson: London, 1976.

Smith, Stan (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden. Cambridge: CUP, 2004.

Wright, George T. W.H. Auden. New York: Twayne, 1969.