W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden (1907-1973), Anglo-American poet, playwright, and literary critic, regarded by many as the most influential poet in English since T. S. Eliot.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, the son of a physician. At first interested in science, he soon turned to poetry. In 1925 he entered Christ Church College, University of Oxford, where he became the center of a group of literary intellectuals that included Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. After graduating in 1928, he was a schoolmaster in Scotland and England for five years.

In London, in the early 1930s, Auden belonged to a circle of promising young poets who were strongly leftist (people who advocate liberal or radical measures to effect change in the established order, especially in politics). His book Poems (1930), which helped to establish his reputation, focused on the breakdown of English capitalist society but also showed a deep concern with psychological problems. He subsequently wrote three verse plays with Isherwood: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F-6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). In 1937 he drove an ambulance for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. In the same year he was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry, a major honor. Trips to Iceland and China—the first with MacNeice, the second with Isherwood—resulted in two jointly written books, Letter from Iceland (1937) and Journey to a War (1939).

In 1939 Auden moved to the United States, where he became a citizen and was active as a poet, reviewer, lecturer, and editor. His Double Man (1941) and For the Time Being (1944) reflect an increasing concern with religion. The Age of Anxiety (1947), a long dramatic poem that begins in a New York City bar, won him the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and provided an apt and convenient name for his era. His numerous other works include Collected Poetry (1945), The Shield of Achilles (1955), Collected Longer Poems (1969), and several opera librettos written with the American Chester Kallman, his friend and companion. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford, and in 1972 he returned to Christ Church as a writer in residence.

As a poet, Auden bore some resemblance to T. S. Eliot. Like him, he had a cool, ironic wit, yet was deeply religious. He was concerned to a greater degree than Eliot, however, with social problems. Possessed of probing psychological insight, Auden also had a supremely lyric gift. Auden's influence on the succeeding generation of poets was immense. Many critics consider Auden a master of verse; his intellectual rigor and social conscience combined with his fluid mix of styles and expert craftsmanship make him a paragon of modern poetics.

See also Sir Stephen Harold Spender