Auden, Wystan Hugh (1907-1973) poet, dramatist, critic, librettist

W. H. Auden was born in York, England, the youngest son of George Augustus Auden, a medical doctor with far-ranging interests. His mother, Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden, was a nurse and a devout Anglican, who passed on her love of music to her son. The Auden family was Scandinavian in origin, and Auden was brought up on the Icelandic sagas. The year after he was born, his father became medical inspector of schools in the industrial city of Birmingham. York and Birmingham both left their mark, for Auden’s favorite rural and urban landscapes remained those of England’s Pennine uplands (celebrated in “In Praise of Limestone,” 1948) and modern industrial cities.

Auden grew up interested in science and literature and considered becoming a mining engineer, but at 15 he determined to become a great poet, though he remained attracted to science. His broad and erudite reading led to verse abounding in scientific and technical terms. Auden became both a private poet and a public spokesman—the intellectual conscience of the generation that grew up in the 1930s between two world wars.

After his education at St. Edmund’s School and Gresham’s in Norfolk, Auden entered Oxford in 1925. At St. Edmund’s he met his lifelong friend, novelist Christopher Isherwood; at Oxford he met fellow poets Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. While at Oxford he fell under the spell of T. S. Eliot, who exerted a brief influence; but more durable were earlier influences such as Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry and the writers Thomas Hardy and W. B. Yeats.

Upon graduating from Oxford, Auden spent 1928-29 in Berlin. He was a natural teacher and returned to become a schoolteacher. During the 1930s he went to Iceland with MacNeice and to Spain and China with Isherwood. On the eve of World War II, he and Isherwood immigrated to the United States, where Auden taught at various universities. America gave him an international point of view and helped him forge a truly international English style.

In 1939 Auden met Chester Kallman, who became his life’s companion. The two men collaborated on several opera libretti, including Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951). In 1946 Auden became an American citizen. He returned to Oxford late in life to become professor of poetry (1956-61) and writer-in-residence at his old college. He died in Vienna and is buried in Kirchstetten, Austria.

Critical Analysis. Auden was a complex and versatile poet who produced numerous volumes of poetry and criticism. He frequently rewrote his work, thus complicating its study. Auden believed that spheres of action and art are separate and that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Nevertheless, he recognized the power of words and wielded them with care. He removed from his canon poems he found less than truthful.

Auden’s literary career has three major phases that may be labeled psychological, political, and religious. During the earliest phase, from 1928 through the mid-1930s, his poetry was influenced by the psychologists and psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud, John Layard, Homer Lane, and Georg Groddeck. As Stephen Spender remarked, Auden’s early verse diagnoses ills in individuals and the body politic: “Sometimes Auden’s poems are more symptomatic than curative; sometimes they concentrate . . . on the idea of a cure.” The poem “Petition” (1929), beginning “Sir, no man’s enemy,” illustrates the difficulty of the early clinical verse. To this period belong Poems 1930, The Orators, and The Dance of Death.

Auden’s second, or political, phase began with Spain (1937), written as a result of firsthand experience of the Spanish civil war. It lasted through the early 1940s and coincides with the period of Auden’s world travels, embracing the verse plays written with Isherwood: The Dog beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). The first is a Brechtian parable, the second about a mountaineering expedition, and the third concerns two families living in hostile states. At this time Auden was strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, though he was never a member of the Communist Party.

The third major phase began with Auden’s emigration to the United States and his return to religion. He rejoined the Anglican Church in New York, and dominant influences were Soren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr. To this period belong the long poems New Year Letter (1940), For the Time Being (1945), and The Age of Anxiety (1947). Also called The Double Man, New Year Letter follows the Kierkegaardian division of life into aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres. Auden described For the Time Being, written to honor his deceased mother, as a Christmas oratorio. In The Age of Anxiety four lone individuals try to make sense of their lives. This period also includes what many believe was Auden’s finest decade, the 1950s, when he published Nones (1951), The Shield of Achilles (1955), and Homage to Clio (1960). An example of the masterly style of this period is “In Praise of Limestone,” which ends:

. . . when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape . . .

Some critics subdivide this period, noting that from the 1960s until his death, Auden wrote the cozy, domestic poems contained in About the House (1966), Epistle to a Godson (1972), and Thank you, Fog (1974).

Auden’s poetry is, as Auden scholar Richard Hoggart observes, characteristically that of an “abstracting and generalizing intelligence.” Auden himself said that his subject was not nature, but mankind in its relation to nature—often a manmade nature. His poems view human life from a distance, as from a great height, set within a dwarfing geological or evolutionary frame. Although his poetry is concrete and specific, it is also abstract and not at all sensuous. Auden’s poems contain striking images, but they are images devoid of color, smell, or taste. This is not a visual poetry. Consider, for example, the poem “May,” which opens: “May with its light behaving/ Stirs vessel, eye, and limb.”

Despite their abstractness, however, Auden’s poems can be most moving because of, not despite, their complex thought. Consider the famous “Lullaby” (1937), which begins “Lay your sleeping head, my love”; or “Musee des Beaux Arts” (1939), with its seemingly casual colloquial opening, “About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters . . .”

Auden’s technical expertise and virtuosity were such that he was able to write poems of all kinds and to bring new luster to complex and outmoded kinds. His elegies for Sigmund Freud, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James obey classic conventions but are contemporary. He rehabilitated the ode and has left many fine ballads and sonnets. Auden is also celebrated for a form of poem he wrote throughout his career: the paysage moralise, or moralized landscape. From the German poet Rilke he learned to regard the human in terms of the nonhuman. Thus, Auden endows landscape with human characteristics, viewing human beings as products of different kinds of landscape or environment, as in the sequence Bucolics (1953), about those who inhabit woods, mountains, lakes, plains, streams, and islands. “In Praise of Limestone” is perhaps the finest example of this genre.

Like his themes, Auden’s style changed over the decades. The early poems were riddling and obscure partly because they were studded with references understood only by a few friends. Thus, “Petition” opens with the deliberately snarled syntax of “Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all/But will its negative inversion, be prodigal.” The early poems are also much indebted to Anglo-Saxon poetry. For example, “The Three Companions” begins, “O where are you going?” (1931) with hammer-beat rhythms and striking alliteration and assonance, giving it the vigor of Anglo-Saxon verse.

In his later years, Auden developed a more relaxed and limber style, distinguished by a rich, exuberant, and dazzling vocabulary and by verse often based on syllabics as well as, or instead of, strong and weak accents. Auden is regarded by many as the 20th-century’s preeminent poet in English. For 40 years he influenced and inspired generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic. As John Hollander observed in a tribute on Auden’s 60th birthday, he was “the most articulate and cosmopolitan of all English poets born in this century.” He was also a perceptive and rewarding critic in volumes such as The Enchafed Flood (1950), The Dyers’s Hand (1962), and Selected Essays (1964).

Works about W. H. Auden:
- Bahlke, George W. Critical Essays on Auden. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991.
- Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography.
- Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Davenport-Hines, Richard. Auden. New York: Pantheon, 1995.
- Haffenden, John, ed. W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

- Hecht, Anthony, The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
- Kirsch, Arthur. Auden and Christianity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005.
- Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. New York: Viking, 1981. . Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.
- Smith, Stan. W. H. Auden. New York: Blackwell, 1985.