W. H. Auden 1907–73

Abstract

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York and educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, and Christ Church, Oxford. His first books of verse, Poems (1930), The Orators (1932), and Look, Stranger! (1936), established him as the ablest and most influential poet of his generation, a metrical genius, achieving, in elegant colloquial verse, a voice which impressed readers of the 1930s as a civilised reply to the stridency of fascism. Auden travelled in Germany, Iceland, China and, in 1937, Spain (in the Republican cause). His writings of this period were fashionably left-wing. He often worked in collaboration: with Christopher Isherwood (1904–85), on plays, The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F 6 (1936) and On the Frontier (1938), and an account of their visit to China, Journey to a War (1939); he wrote Letters from Iceland (1937) with Louis MacNeice (1907–63); Benjamin Britten set his verse to music and based his first opera, Paul Bunyan (1941), on Auden’s script. Auden went to America early in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946. A new collection of poems, Another Time, was published in 1940. New Year Letter (1941), an essay in verse which ends with a prayer, was the beginning of the Christian outlook of his increasingly complex post-war verse. For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio and The Sea and the Mirror (dramatic monologues based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest) appeared in 1944, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue in 1948, The Shield of Achilles in 1955.