Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 –
29 September 1973) IPA: /ˈwɪstən hjuː
ˈɔːdən/;[1], who signed his works W. H.
Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[2] His work is noted for its stylistic and
technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form, and content.[3][4] The central themes of his poetry are: personal love, politics and
citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of
nature.
Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle-class
family and read English Literature at Oxford. His early poems, in the late 1920s
and 1930s, alternated between obscure modern styles and accessible traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic
tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later
1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes
in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined new forms devised by Auden himself with traditional forms
and styles. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he
took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings. [5]
He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects, and
he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both
controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues"
("Stop all the clocks") and "September 1, 1939", became widely known through films,
broadcasts, and popular media.[2]
Life
- Except where noted, this section is based on the standard biographies and critical studies by Humphrey Carpenter,[6] Richard Davenport-Hines,[7] and Edward Mendelson,[8][9] a memoir by Thekla Clark,[10] and the Auden entry in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography.[11]
Childhood and education, 1907-1927
Childhood
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, where his father
George Augustus Auden was a physician. Wystan was the third of three children, all
sons; the oldest, George Bernard Auden, became a farmer; the second, John Bicknell
Auden, became a geologist. His mother, Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden, had trained as a missionary nurse. Auden's
grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen; his household was Anglo-Catholic, following a "High" form of Anglicanism with doctrine and ritual resembling that of Roman
Catholicism. Auden traced his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood.[11] He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his
lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and sagas is visible throughout his work.[12]
In 1908 his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and
Lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health; Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. From the
age of eight he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays.[6]
From the ages six to twelve, "I spent a great many of my waking hours in the fabrication of a private secondary sacred world,
the basic elements of which were (a) a limestone landscape mainly derived from the Pennine Moors in the North of England, and (b)
an industry - lead mining".[13] His visits to the Pennine
landscape and its declining lead-mining industry figure in many of his poems; the remote decaying mining village of
Rookhope was for him a "sacred landscape",[14] evoked in a late poem, "Amor Loci".
Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his "passion for words" had already begun. He wrote later:
"words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do".[15]
Education
Auden's first school was St. Edmund's School (Hindhead),
Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later
famous as a novelist. At thirteen he went to Gresham's School in Norfolk, where, in 1922, his friend Robert Medley first suggested that he
might write poetry. In the same year he "discover[ed] that he has lost his faith" (through a gradual realization that he had lost
interest in religion, not through any decisive change of views).[16] His first poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923.[17]
In 1925 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology, but he
switched to English by his second year. Friends he met at Oxford included Cecil Day
Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen
Spender; these four were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "Auden
Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. He left Oxford in 1928 with a third-class degree.[6][11]
He was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925; for the next few years
Isherwood was his literary mentor to whom he sent poems for comments and criticism. Auden probably fell in love with Isherwood
(who was unaware of the intensity of Auden's feelings) and in the 1930s they maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between
their relations with others. In 1935-39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.[18]
From his Oxford years onward, his friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by
his own choice, lonely. In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident
and shy except when certain of his welcome. He was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while choosing
to live amidst physical disorder.[7]
Britain and Europe, 1928-1938
In the autumn of 1928 Auden left Britain for nine months in Weimar Berlin, partly to rebel against English repressiveness in a city where homosexuality was widely tolerated. In
Berlin, he said, he first experienced the political and economic unrest that became one of his central subjects.[11]
On returning to Britain in 1929, he worked briefly as a tutor. In 1930 his first published book, Poems (1930), was
accepted by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber; the
firm also published all his later books. In 1930 he began five years as a schoolmaster in boys' schools: two years at the
Larchfield Academy, in Helensburgh, Scotland,
then three years at the The Downs School, near Malvern, Worcestershire, where he was a much-loved teacher. At the Downs, in June 1933, he
experienced what he later described as a "Vision of Agape," when, while
sitting with three fellow-teachers at the school, he suddenly found that he loved them for themselves, that their existence had
infinite value for him; this experience, he said, later influenced his decision to return to the Anglican Church in 1940.[19]
During these years, Auden's erotic interests focused, as he later said, on an idealized "Alter Ego"[20] rather than on individual persons. His relations (and his unsuccessful
courtships) tended to be unequal either in age or intelligence; his sexual relations were transient, although some evolved into
long friendships. He contrasted these relations with what he regarded as the "marriage" (his word) of equals that he began with
Chester Kallman in 1939 (see below), based on the unique individuality of both
partners.[8]
From the G.P.O. Film Unit's
Night Mail; scene possibly directed by Auden
From 1935 until he left Britain early in 1939, Auden worked as freelance reviewer, essayist, and lecturer, first with the
G.P.O. Film Unit, a documentary film-making branch of the post office, headed by
John Grierson. He collaborated there with Benjamin
Britten, with whom he also worked on plays, song cycles, and a libretto. Auden's plays in the 1930s were performed by the
Group Theatre, in productions that he supervised to varying degrees.[11]
His work now reflected his belief that any good artist must be "more than a bit of a reporting journalist".[21] In 1936 he spent three months in Iceland, where he gathered material for a
travel book Letters from Iceland (1937), written in collaboration with
Louis MacNeice. In 1937 he went to Spain intending to
drive an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but was put to work
broadcasting propaganda, a job he left in order to visit the front. His seven-week visit to Spain affected him deeply, and his
social views grew more complex as he found political realities to be more ambiguous and troubling than he had imagined. Again
attempting to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 visiting the Sino-Japanese War, working on their book Journey to a
War (1939). On their way back to England they stayed briefly in New York and decided to move to the United States.
Auden spent the autumn of 1938 partly in England, partly in Brussels.[6]
Many of his poems during the 1930s and afterward were inspired by unconsummated love, and in the 1950s he summarized his
emotional life in a famous couplet: "If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me" ("The More Loving One"). He
had a gift for friendship and, starting in the late 1930s, a strong wish for the stability of marriage; in a letter to his friend
James Stern he called marriage "the only subject".[22] Throughout his life, he performed charitable acts, sometimes in public, as in
his marriage of convenience to Erika Mann in 1935 that gave her a British passport with which
to escape the Nazis, but, especially in later years, usually in private, and he was embarrassed if they were publicly revealed
(as when his gift to his friend Dorothy Day for the Catholic Worker movement was reported on the front page of the New York Times in 1956).[23]
United States and Europe, 1939-1973
Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York in January 1939, entering on temporary visas. Their departure from Britain was later
seen by many there as a betrayal and Auden's reputation suffered. In April 1939 Isherwood moved to California, and he and Auden
saw each other only intermittently in later years. Around this time, Auden met an eighteen-year old poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next two years (Auden described their relation as a
"marriage" that began with a cross-country "honeymoon" journey).[24] He and Kallman remained companions for the rest of Auden's life, sharing houses and apartments from
1953 until Auden's death. Auden dedicated both editions of his collected poetry (1945/50 and 1966)
to Isherwood and Kallman.
In 1940-41, Auden lived in a house in Brooklyn Heights which he shared
with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and
others, and which became a famous center of artistic life.[25] In 1940, he joined the Episcopal
Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at thirteen. His
reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles
Williams,[26] whom he had met in 1937, partly by
reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold
Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in
his life.[27]
In 1941-42 he taught English at the University of Michigan. He was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942, but did not use it, choosing instead to teach at
Swarthmore College in 1942-45. In the summer of 1945, after the end of World War II
in Europe, he was in Germany with the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey,
studying the effects of Allied bombing on German morale, an experience that affected his postwar work as his visit to Spain had
affected him earlier. On his return, he settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer
and as a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American colleges. In 1946 he became a naturalized
citizen of the US.[6][11]
His theology in his later years evolved from a highly inward and psychologically oriented Protestantism in the early 1940s to a more Roman
Catholic-oriented interest in the significance of the body and in collective ritual in the later 1940s and 1950s, and
finally to the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer which rejected "childish" conceptions
of God for an adult religion that focused on the significance of human suffering.[27]
Auden began summering in Europe in 1948, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house,
then, starting 1958, in Kirchstetten, Austria where he bought a farmhouse, and, he said,
shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first time.[6]
In 1951, shortly before the two British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the USSR, Burgess attempted to phone Auden to arrange a vacation visit to Ischia
that he had earlier discussed with Auden; Auden never returned the call and had no further contact with either spy, but a media
frenzy ensued in which his name was mistakenly associated with their escape. The frenzy was repeated when the MI5 documents on the incident were released in 2007.[28][29]
In 1956-61, Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University where he was required to give three lectures each year. This fairly light
workload allowed him to spend most of his time in New York and his summer home. He now earned his income mostly by readings and
lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker and other magazines.[11]
During his last years, his conversation became repetitive, to the disappointment of friends who had known him earlier as a
witty and wide-ranging conversationalist.[6] In 1972, he moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college,
Christ Church, offered him a cottage, but he continued to summer in Austria. He died in Vienna in
1973 and was buried in Kirchstetten.[6]
Work
- Except where noted, this section is based on the standard critical studies by John Fuller[5] and Edward Mendelson,[8][9] and the essays in The Cambridge Companion to W. H.
Auden.[2]
Overview
Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in
scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and
limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque
eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to complex philosophical
meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.[5]
He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other
subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera
libretti with Chester Kallman, worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on
documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in
the 1950s and 1960s. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . . . than
any sexual relations I have had".[30]
Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He
wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views that he had never held
but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective.[31] His rejected poems include "Spain" and "September 1, 1939". His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Auden's Selected Poems that Auden's practice
reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it.[32] (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and early texts
of poems that he revised.)
Early work, 1922-1939
Cover of the privately-printed
Poems (1928)
Through 1930
Auden began writing poems at thirteen, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas
Hardy. At eighteen he discovered T. S. Eliot and adopted an extreme version of
Eliot's style. He found his own voice at twenty, when he wrote the first poem later included in his collected work, "From the
very first coming down". This and other poems of the late 1920s tended to be in a clipped, elusive style that alluded to, but did
not directly state, their themes of loneliness and loss. Twenty of these poems appeared in his first book Poems (1928), a pamphlet hand-printed by Stephen
Spender.[33]
In 1928 he wrote his first dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides, subtitled "A
Charade," which combined style and content from the Icelandic sagas with jokes from English school
life. This mixture of tragedy and farce, with a dream play-within-the-play, introduced the mixed styles and content of much of
his later work. This drama and thirty short poems appeared in his first published book Poems (1930, 2nd edition with seven poems replaced, 1933); the poems in the book were mostly lyrical
and gnomic mediations on hoped-for or unconsummated love and on themes of personal, social, and seasonal renewal; among these
poems were "It was Easter as I walked," "Doom is dark," "Sir, no man's enemy," and "This lunar beauty."[8]
A recurrent theme in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts", Auden's term for the powerful, unseen psychological
effects of preceding generations on any individual life (and the title of a poem). A parallel theme, present throughout his work,
is the contrast between biological evolution (unchosen and involuntary) and the psychological evolution of cultures and
individuals (voluntary and deliberate even in its subconscious aspects).[8]
1931 through 1935
Auden's next large-scale work was The Orators: An English Study (1932; revised
editions, 1934, 1966), in verse and prose, largely about hero-worship in personal and political life. In his shorter poems, his
style became more open and accessible, and the exuberant "Six Odes" in The Orators reflect his new interest in Robert
Burns. During the next few years, many of his poems took their form and style from traditional ballads and popular songs, and
also from expansive classical forms like the Odes of Horace, which he seems to have discovered
through the German poet Hölderlin. Around this time his main influences were
Dante, William Langland, and Alexander Pope.[34]
Programme of a Group Theatre production of
The Dance of Death, with
unsigned synopsis by Auden
During these years, much of his work expressed left-wing views, and he became widely known as a political poet, although his
work was more politically ambivalent than many reviewers recognized. He generally wrote about revolutionary change in terms of a
"change of heart", a transformation of a society from a closed-off psychology of fear to an open psychology of love. His verse
drama The Dance of Death (1933) was a political extravaganza in the
style of a theatrical revue, which Auden later called "a nihilistic leg-pull".[35] His next play The Dog Beneath the Skin
(1935), written in collaboration with Isherwood, was similarly a quasi-Marxist updating of Gilbert and Sullivan in which the general idea of social transformation was more prominent than any
specific political action or structure.[8][5]
The Ascent of F6 (1937), another play written with Isherwood, was partly an
anti-imperialist satire, partly (in the character of the self-destroying climber Michael Ransom) an examination of Auden's own
motives in taking on a public role as a political poet. This play included the first version of "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), written as a satiric eulogy for a politician; Auden later rewrote
the poem as a "Cabaret Song" about lost love (written to be sung by the soprano Hedli
Anderson for whom he wrote many lyrics in the 1930s). In 1935, he worked briefly on documentary films with the
G.P.O. Film Unit, writing his famous verse commentary for Night Mail and lyrics for other films that were among his attempts in the 1930s to create a
widely-accessible, socially-conscious art.[8][5]
1936 through 1939
These tendencies in style and content culminate in his collection Look, Stranger! (1936; his British publisher chose
the title; Auden retitled the 1937 US edition On This Island). This book included
political odes, love poems, comic songs, meditative lyrics, and a variety of intellectually intense but emotionally accessible
verse. Among the poems included in the book, connected by themes of personal, social, and evolutionary change and of the
possibilities and problems of personal love, were "Hearing of harvests", "Out on the lawn I lie in bed", "O what is that sound",
"Look, stranger, on this island now", and "Our hunting fathers."[8][5]
Auden was now arguing that an artist should be a kind of journalist, and he put this view into practice in Letters from Iceland (1937) a travel book in prose and verse written with Louis MacNeice, which included his long social, literary, and autobiographical commentary "Letter to Lord
Byron". In 1937, after observing the Spanish Civil War he wrote a politically-engaged
pamphlet poem Spain (1937); he later discarded it from his collected works.
Journey to a War (1939) a travel book in prose and verse, was written with
Isherwood after their visit to the Sino-Japanese War. Auden's last
collaboration with Isherwood was their third play, On the Frontier, an anti-war
satire written in Broadway and West End
styles.[8][11]
Auden's themes in his shorter poems now included the fragility and transience of personal love ("Danse Macabre", "The Dream",
"Lay your sleeping head"), a theme he treated with ironic wit in his "Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson" (which included "O Tell Me the Truth About Love" and the revised version of
"Funeral Blues"), and also the corrupting effect of public and official culture on
individual lives ("Casino", "School Children", "Dover"). In 1938 he wrote a series of dark, ironic ballads about individual
failure ("Miss Gee", "James Honeyman", "Victor"). All these appeared in his next book of verse, Another Time (1940), together with other famous poems such as "Dover", "As He Is", and
"Musée des Beaux Arts" (all written before he moved to America in 1939), and "In
Memory of W. B. Yeats", "The Unknown Citizen", "Law Like
Love", "September 1, 1939", and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (written in
America). The elegies for Yeats and Freud are partly statements of Auden's anti-heroic theme, in which great deeds are performed,
not by unique geniuses whom others cannot hope to imitate, but by otherwise ordinary individuals who were "silly like us" (Yeats)
or of whom it could be said "he wasn't clever at all" (Freud), and who became teachers of others, not awe-inspiring
heroes.[8]
Middle period, 1940-1957
1940 through 1946
In 1940 Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year Letter", which appeared with miscellaneous notes and other poems in
The Double Man (1941). At the time of his return to the Anglican Communion he
began writing abstract verse on theological themes, such as "Canzone" and "Kairos and Logos". Around 1942, as he became more
comfortable with religious themes, his verse became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly used the syllabic verse he learned from the poetry of Marianne
Moore.[9]
His recurring themes in this period included the artist's temptation to use other persons as material for his art rather than
valuing them for themselves ("Prospero to Ariel") and the corresponding moral obligation to make and keep commitments while
recognizing the temptation to break them ("In Sickness and Health").[5][9]
From 1942 through 1947 he worked mostly on three long poems in dramatic form, each differing from the others in form and
content: "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest" (both published in
For the Time Being, 1944), and The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue
(published separately 1947). The first two, with Auden's other new poems from 1940-44, were included in his first collected
edition, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), with most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions.[5]
1947 through 1957
After completing The Age of Anxiety in 1946 he focused again on shorter poems, notably "A Walk After Dark," "The Love
Feast", and "The Fall of Rome." Many of these evoked the Italian village where he summered in 1948-57, and his next book,
Nones (1951), had a Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work. A new theme was the
"sacred importance" of the human body[36] in its ordinary
aspect (breathing, sleeping, eating) and the continuity with nature that the body made possible (in contrast to the division
between humanity and nature that he had emphasized in the 1930s); his poems on these themes included "In Praise of Limestone" and "Memorial for the City".[5][9] In 1949 Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto for Igor
Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, and later collaborated on two
libretti for operas by Hans Werner Henze.[6]
Auden's first separate prose book was The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic
Iconography of the Sea (1950), based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature. Between 1949 and
1954 he worked on a sequence of seven Good Friday poems, "Horae Canonicae", an encyclopedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history,
focused on the irreversible act of murder; the poem was also a study in cyclical and linear ideas of time. While writing this, he
also wrote a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to nature, "Bucolics". Both sequences appeared in his next book,
The Shield of Achilles (1955), with other short poems, including the
book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier".[5][9]
Extending the themes of "Horae Canonicae", in 1955–56 he wrote a group of poems about "history," a word he used to mean the
set of unique events made by human choices, as opposed to "nature," the set of involuntary events created by natural processes,
statistics, and anonymous forces such as crowds. These poems included "T the Great", "The Maker", and the title poem of his next
collection Homage to Clio (1960).[5][9]
Later work, 1958-1973
In the late 1950s Auden's style became less rhetorical while its range of styles increased. In 1958, having moved his summer
home from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno"; other poems from this period include "Dichtung und Wahrheit:
An Unwritten Poem", a prose poem about the relation between love and personal and poetic language, and the contrasting "Dame
Kind", about the anonymous impersonal reproductive instinct. These and other poems, including his 1955-66 poems about history,
appeared in Homage to Clio (1960).[5][9]
His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in
Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956-61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s.
While translating the haiku and other verse in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings,
Auden began using haiku for many of his poems. A sequence of fifteen poems about his house in Austria, "Thanksgiving for a
Habitat", appeared in About the House (1965), with other poems that included his
reflections on his lecture tours, "On the Circuit". In the late 1960s he wrote some of his most vigorous poems, including "River
Profile" and two poems that looked back over his life, "Prologue at Sixty" and "Forty Years On". All these appeared in
City Without Walls (1969). His lifelong passion for Icelandic legend
culminated in his verse translation of The Elder Edda (1969).[5][9]
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) was a kind of self-portrait made up
of favorite quotations with commentary, arranged in alphabetical order by subject. His last prose book was a selection of essays
and reviews, Forewords and Afterwords (1973).
His last books of verse, Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the unfinished
Thank You, Fog (1974) include reflective poems about language ("Natural
Linguistics") and about his own aging ("A New Year Greeting", "Talking to Myself", "A Lullaby" ["The din of work is subdued"]).
His last completed poem, in haiku form, was "Archeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later
years.[9]
Reputation and influence
Auden’s stature in modern literature is much disputed, with opinions ranging from that of Hugh MacDiarmid, who called him "a complete wash-out", to the obituarist in the Times (London),
who wrote: "W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry . . . emerges as its undisputed
master".[37]
In his enfant terrible stage in the 1930s he was both praised and dismissed as a progressive and accessible voice, in
contrast to the politically nostalgic and poetically obscure voice of T. S. Eliot. His
departure for America in 1939 was hotly debated in Britain (once even in Parliament), with some critics treating it as a
betrayal, and the role of influential young poet passed to Dylan Thomas, although defenders
such as Geoffrey Grigson, in an introduction to a 1949 anthology of modern poetry,
wrote that Auden "arches over all". His stature was suggested by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes (1972).[2]
In the US, starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden’s regular stanzas set the style for a whole
generation of poets; John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s Auden "was the modern
poet". His manner was so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Beat
Generation was partly a reaction against his influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, some British writers (notably
Philip Larkin) lamented that Auden’s work had declined from its earlier promise.[38]
By the time of Auden’s death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman. With some exceptions, British
critics tended to treat his early work as his best, while American critics tended to favor his middle and later work. Unlike
other modern poets, his reputation did not decline after his death, and Joseph Brodsky
wrote that his was "the greatest mind of the twentieth century".[4]
Auden’s popularity and familiarity suddenly increased after his "Funeral Blues" ("Stop
all the clocks") was read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a
Funeral (1994); subsequently, a pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold more
than 275,000 copies. After September 11, 2001, his poem "September 1, 1939" was widely
circulated.[37] Public readings
and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in 2007 marked his centenary year.[39]
Published works
- See also: Category:Poetry of W. H. Auden and
Category:Books by W. H. Auden
In the list below, works reprinted in the Complete Works of W. H. Auden are indicated by footnote references.
Books and selected pamphlets
- Poems (1928, privately printed; different contents from 1930 volume with the
same title) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood).
- Poems (1930; second edn., seven poems substituted, 1933; includes poems and
Paid on Both Sides: A Charade[40]) (dedicated to Christopher
Isherwood).
- The Orators: An English Study (1932, verse and prose; slightly revised edn. 1934;
revised edn. with new preface, 1966) (dedicated to Stephen Spender).
- The Dance of Death (1933, play)[40] (dedicated to Robert Medley and
Rupert Doone).
- Poems (New York, 1934; contains Poems [1933 edition], The Orators
[1932 edition], and The Dance of Death).
- The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935, play, with Christopher Isherwood)[40] (dedicated to Robert Moody).
- The Ascent of F6 (1936, play, with Christopher Isherwood)[40] (dedicated to John Bicknell Auden).
- Look, Stranger! (1936, poems; US edn., On
This Island, 1937) (dedicated to Erika Mann)
- Spain (1937, poem, pamphlet).
- Letters from Iceland (1937, verse and prose, with Louis MacNeice)[41]
(dedicated to George Augustus Auden).
- On the Frontier (1938, play, with Christopher Isherwood)[40] (dedicated to Benjamin Britten).
- Journey to a War (1939, verse and prose, with Christopher Isherwood)[41] (dedicated to E. M. Forster).
- Another Time (1940, poetry) (dedicated to Chester Kallman).
- The Double Man (1941, poems; UK edn., New Year Letter) (Dedicated to
Elizabeth Mayer).
- For the Time Being (1944, two long poems: "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest", dedicated to
James and Tania Stern, and "For the Time Being:
A Christmas Oratorio", in memoriam Constance Rosalie Auden [Auden's mother]).
- The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden (1945; includes new poems) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
- The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947, verse; won the 1948
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) (dedicated to John
Betjeman).
- The Enchafèd Flood (1950, prose) (dedicated to Alan Ansen).
- Collected Shorter Poems, 1930-1944 (1950; similar to 1945 Collected Poetry) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
- Nones (1951, poems) (dedicated to Reinhold
and Ursula Niebuhr)
- The Shield of Achilles (1955, poems; won the 1956 National Book Award for Poetry) (dedicated to Lincoln
and Fidelma Kirstein).
- Homage to Clio (1960, poems) (dedicated to E. R.
and A. E. Dodds).
- The Dyer's Hand (1962, essays) (dedicated to Nevill Coghill).
- About the House (1965, poems) (dedicated to Edmund and Elena Wilson).
- Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966) (dedicated to Christopher
Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
- Secondary Worlds (1967, prose) (dedicated to Valerie Eliot).
- Collected Longer Poems (1969).
- City Without Walls and Other Poems (1969) (dedicated to Peter Heyworth).
- A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970, quotations with commentary)
(dedicated to Geoffrey Gorer).
- Academic Graffiti (poems, 1971) (in memoriam Ogden Nash).
