photo © Jill Krementz

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.

Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.

He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.

W. H. Auden was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Poems (privately printed, 1928)
Poems (1930)
The Orators prose and verse (1932)
Look, Stranger! in America: On This Island (1936)
Spain (1937)
Another Time (1940)
The Double Man (1941)
The Quest (1941)
For the Time Being (1944)
The Sea and the Mirror (1944)
Collected Poetry (1945)
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947)
Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944 (1950)
Nones (1952)
The Shield of Achilles (1955)
Selected Poetry (1956)
The Old Man's Road (1956)
Homage to Clio (1960)
About the House About the House (1965)
Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966)
Collected Longer Poems (1968)
City without Walls (1969)
Academic Graffiti (1971)
Epistle to a Godson (1972)
Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (1974)
Selected Poems (1979)
Collected Poems (1991)

Prose

Letters from Iceland (1937)
Journey to a War (1939)
Enchaféd Flood (1950)
The Dyer's Hand (1962)
Selected Essays (1964)
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Anthology

Selected Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf (1972)

Drama

Paid On Both Sides (1928)
The Dance of Death (1933)
The Dog Beneath the Skin: or, Where is Francis? (1935)
The Ascent of F.6 (1936)
On the Frontier (1938)