W. H. Auden | British Poet & Political Activist (2024)

W. H. Auden (born February 21, 1907, York, Yorkshire, England—died September 29, 1973, Vienna, Austria) was an 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.

Legacy

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).