W. H. AUDEN - BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In an extraordinary and ever-changing career, W. H. Auden created one of the largest, richest, and most varied bodies of work of any poet of the twentieth century. In shorter and in longer forms, he combined a vigorous wit and a searching but often playful intellect with a passionate moral sense, in a lifelong engagement with the issues of human imperfection, sin and redemption, and the quest for both social and spiritual justice. Although Auden often addresses himself to the intellect and speaks in a public voice reminiscent of the schoolmaster that he briefly was, he is capable of heartrending emotion, and he is also one of the finest love poets of the twentieth century; in this capacity, his work enjoyed an unexpected burst of popularity when "Funeral Blues" was recited in the 1994 hit film Four Weddings and a Funeral. In many ways and for many reasons, he was a controversial figure from the beginning to the end of his career, but when all the controversies have ended, he remains one of the most accomplished and significant writers of his time.

  Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907, the third of three sons of George Augustus Auden, a physician, and Constance Rosalie (Bicknell) Auden, a former nurse, who had studied at Royal Holloway College, winning a gold medal for French. According to Auden himself, there was a fundamental clash between his father's easy-going ways and his mother's imperious manner. The year after his birth, the family moved to Birmingham, in whose environs Auden began to develop his lifelong fascination with urban and industrial landscapes. From 1915 to 1920, he attended St. Edmund's School in Hindhead, Surrey; it was there that he first met Christopher Isherwood, with whom he would collaborate in the 1930s on three plays and a book based on their travels together in China. From 1920 to 1925, he attended Gresham's School in Holt, Norfolk. In those early years, Auden's principal interests were scientific, especially geology and mining (although he was also precociously reading Freud), but in 1922--the same year in which Auden discovered that he had lost his religious belief--Robert Medley, a friend and classmate, suggested to him that he should write poetry. From the outset, much of his verse had a dry, conversational tone that would characterize one of his several mature styles, but his first publication was a much more traditional lyric called "Dawn" which appeared, unsigned, in The Gresham in December 1922. One of Auden's earliest poetic enthusiasms was Edward Thomas, an English poet who had been killed in 1917 in the First World War; through this interest, Auden discovered the work of the friend--Robert Frost--who had suggested to Thomas that he should write poetry, and Auden would remain a lifelong admirer of Frost.

 In the autumn of 1925, Auden became an undergraduate at Christ Church College of Oxford University. He started as a student of natural science, but, after a brief flirtation with politics, economics, and philosophy, settled on English. His tutor was Nevill Coghill, who later became known as a scholar of medieval literature and a translator of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland into modern English. While at Oxford, Auden met several other undergraduate poets: Louis MacNeice, who would also collaborate with Auden on a travel book in the 1930s; Cecil Day Lewis, who would go on to become Poet Laureate and the father of the actor Daniel Day Lewis; and Stephen Spender, who in the summer of 1928 would privately print a booklet of Auden's verse in an edition of about forty-five copies.

 As the end of his college years approached and adult life loomed before him, Auden began to be concerned about his homosexuality, and apparently began to see an analyst. Not only was homosexuality severely condemned by the standards of his religious upbringing, his reading of Freud had suggested that it was an immature phase, indicative of arrested development; also, homosexual activity was at that time a criminal offense in England, subject to a prison term. In his attempts to live what he then regarded as a normal life, Auden had a sexual relationship with one woman and later became engaged to another, but he broke off the engagement after several months. (In June 1935, Auden would marry Erika Mann, the daughter of the great German novelist Thomas Mann, but this was done in order secure her a British passport and enable her to leave Nazi Germany; although they never lived together as husband and wife, Auden took more than a casual interest in the relationship, and dedicated his next book of poetry to her.)

 After Auden's college graduation in 1928, his father offered to pay for him to spend a year abroad, and thus Auden lived from October 1928 to July 1929 in Berlin. There, he was exposed to a freer lifestyle than anything he had experienced in England, and he made the acquaintance of John Layard, a British disciple of the American theorist Homer Lane, who equated sin with neurosis and advocated the release of unconscious guilt into more positive and creative channels. In choosing to acknowledge his sexual orientation and live by its dictates, Auden also committed himself to a life of secrecy and public evasion that necessarily involved a degree of alienation from mainstream existence. In March 1929, Auden was joined in Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, whose experiences there became the basis for a group of stories that would, in other hands, undergo a series of transmutations culminating in the Broadway musical Cabaret.

 Upon his return to England, Auden worked as a tutor in London, and in 1930 began a two-year period as a schoolmaster at Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, Scotland, which was followed by three years at the Downs School in Colwall. Meanwhile, he achieved his first major publication when T. S. Eliot's journal The Criterion published Paid on Both Sides, a "charade" in prose and verse about the destructive consequences of a feud between two families. Later in that year, the prestigious firm of Faber & Faber, of which Eliot was an editor, issued Auden's first commercially published volume, Poems.  Auden's earliest works quickly brought him attention, as discerning critics and readers noted the appearance of a brilliant and original poet. These poems and the longer works The Orators (1932) and The Dance of Death (1933) were characterized by indirectness of statement, often expressed in clipped phrasing and short lines. They were powerful and disturbing, if frequently obscure, comments on the times. Within a short time, Auden became the most closely watched, controversial, and influential young poet in Britain. In the summer of 1935, he began a six-month stint as a writer and assistant director for the GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit, through which he collaborated on several projects with the young composer Benjamin Britten. With Britten, several years later in the United States, Auden would write his first opera, Paul Bunyan. In the late 1930s, he also wrote several verse dramas on social themes with Christopher Isherwood, as well as books of description and commentary with Isherwood (on China) and Louis MacNeice (on Iceland). Perhaps these writings for a broader audience had some effect on Auden's poetic style, or perhaps he would have moved in any case toward a more open manner, but, for whatever reasons, he began in the middle 1930s to write in more accessible styles and more directly to address issues of social and political engagement. He was never a member of the Communist party, despite once titling a poem "A Communist

 to Others," but, like most intellectuals and artists of the 1930s, he aligned himself with those far-left movements that represented the most visible and seemingly effective response to the worldwide economic distress and the rising fascist threat. Out of this commitment came a trip to Spain in 1937 to observe the fighting between the democratic Loyalist armies and the right-wing forces of General Francisco Franco, and the poem entitled "Spain" (which Auden later repudiated as bad politics and bad art). 

In January 1939, Auden performed the most controversial act of his life when he and Christopher Isherwood sailed from England to take up permanent residence in the United States. Isherwood moved to California, where he would spend the rest of his life, and Auden settled at first in New York. Auden had wished to distance himself from the inbred and often vindictive literary world of London, and to nourish his art and his nature on wider shores, but to many in England his departure represented a flight from danger on the eve of a world war, an unforgivable act of cowardice and betrayal, rousing such strong passions that even a third of a century later the news of his death was greeted by some Englishmen with unrestrained pleasure. In New York in the spring of 1939, Auden met Chester Kallman, an eighteen-year-old American who regarded his own sexuality with none of the tortured conflict that characterized Auden. Although their physical relationship would be of brief duration, they would remain emotionally and intellectually bonded for the rest of their lives (Kallman introduced Auden to opera, and the two went on to collaborate on libretti for such important composers as Igor Stravinsky and Hans Werner Henze; Kallman would be with Auden when he died, and, although a much younger man, would himself die less than eighteen months later). In the late summer of that year, as Hitler's armies rolled into Poland to commence the most deadly conflict in the history of the world, Auden wrote "September 1, 1939," one of the his greatest poems, and one of the many first-rate pieces in Another Time (1940), which also included "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," "As I Walked Out One Evening," "Funeral Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," "Musée des Beaux Arts," the intensely beautiful "Lullaby" ("Lay your sleeping head, my love"), and the astonishing ballads "Miss Gee" and "Victor." The brilliance of the writing, the dazzling use of a variety of styles and forms, and the depth and passion of the treatment of public and private themes--all these qualities combine to make this Auden's single finest collection and one of the greatest books of poetry published in the twentieth century. 

In October 1940, Auden found the permanent commitment that political engagement had failed to provide, when he once again became a communicant of the Anglicanchurch (as an unconscious sign of his growing inclination, he had been shocked and upset on his arrival in Barcelona in 1937 to find that all the churches had been closed). Through much of the 1940s, Auden occupied himself with the writing of long poems: The Double Man, The Sea and the Mirror, For the Time Being (a Christmas oratorio of religious commitment in the midst of world war, and technically one of the most accomplished things Auden ever wrote), and The Age of Anxiety, a long philosophical dialogue written in Anglo-Saxon measures, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1948 (Auden had become an American citizen in 1946). From 1946 to 1958, Auden served as judge and editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which publishes each year the first book of a promising young poet. His remarkably astute selections included a number of poets who went on to major careers, among them Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, Daniel Hoffman, John Ashbery, James Wright, and John Hollander. As George Bradley says in his Introduction to The Yale Younger Poets Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998): "The Yale Younger Poets chosen by Auden are still the ones on which the series' reputation rests, and they include some of the most adroit poets America has ever produced.... By any measure, it was a virtuoso performance." Thereafter, as Auden settled into his (somewhat premature) middle age, his writing began to lose some of the tautness and intensity that had previously been among its most distinguishing characteristics, and he turned to the writing of several middle-length, meditative sequences of shorter poems: "Bucolics" and "Horae Canonicae," the finest examples, were both published in The Shield of Achilles in 1955. In the midst of opera libretti and a great amount of discursive prose, he continued to write shorter poems that were remarkable for both their technical skill and their thematic investigations, including "Under Which Lyre," a clever treatise on aesthetic and moral choices; "In Praise of Limestone," a nuanced analysis of the nature of human personality; and "The Shield of Achilles," one of his very greatest poems, a chilling commentary on the pervasiveness of cruelty.

  Most critics find the poems in Auden's last four books of poetry, published between 1965 and 1974, among the weakest parts of his collected work, seeing them as slack and facile in execution, often trivial in theme, and concerned above all with the display of a personality that had grown cozy and somewhat crotchety. Several critics have particularly objected to his tendency to dot these texts with old and disused words culled from his compulsive reading of the Oxford English Dictionary, suggesting that these poems are essentially about themselves, rather than some larger and more significant subject. But, while it is rarely suggested that these poems constitute his greatest accomplishment, there are those who, taking them on their own terms, find them to possess many charms and some occasional depths, and to be a not unfitting conclusion to one of the most significant poetic careers of the century. Auden bought a house in Austria in 1958, where he spent six months of every year thereafter. In 1972, in failing health, he permanently left New York to take up residence in a cottage at Christ Church College of Oxford University, his alma mater. On the evening of September 28, 1973, he gave a poetry reading in Vienna, Austria. Later that night in his hotel room, he died in his sleep of heart failure. He was sixty-six years old.

 After Yeats and Eliot, Auden is the most influential English-language poet of the twentieth century. In his best work, he is their equal in artistry and in the complexity and profundity of his treatment of the central concerns of the human condition, and he is their superior in the range and variety of his poetry. No history of the literature of the twentieth century can pretend to thoroughness without a consideration of his contribution to it. No list of its greatest poets can be complete without his name.