Wystan Hugh Auden (/ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,born in England, an American citizen (from 1946), and regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety in tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are 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 and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, written in an intense and dramatic tone and in a style that alternated between telegraphic modern and fluent traditional, established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. In the late 1930s he became uncomfortable in this role and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939. In his poems from the 1940s he explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than in his earlier works, and combined traditional forms and styles with new, original forms. The focus of many of his poems from the 1950s and 1960s was on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions. He took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings. Following his death in 1973, his memorial stone was unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey in 1974.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"), "Musée des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939", became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.
University of Oxford, Christ Church, Oxford, Gresham's School
Spouse
Erika Mann (m. 1935–1969)
Parents
George Augustus Auden, Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden
Siblings
John Bicknell Auden, George Bernard Auden
Awards
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Bollingen Prize, National Book Award for Poetry, St. Louis Literary Award, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada, American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Poetry
Nominations
National Book Award for Arts and Letters (Nonfiction)
Movies
Night Mail, The Way to the Sea, Runner
Star Sign
Pisces
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Quote
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I think a great many of us are haunted by the feelings that our society - and I don't mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilization, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist - is going to go smash, and probably deserves to.
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[considering Shakespeare's sonnets] Art may spill over from creating a world of language into the dangerous and forbidden task of trying to create a human being.
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Even Hifler, I imagine, would have defined his New Jerusalem as a world where there are no Jews, not as a world where they are being gassed by the million day after day in ovens. But he was a Utopian, so the ovens had to come in.
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[observation, 1970] What a pleasant surprise it would be to meet a crew-cut hippie or a company director with hair down to his shoulders.
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[on J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings"] If someone dislikes it, I shall never trust their literary judgment about anything again.
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Fact
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He was a long time friend (from the 1920s until Auden's death in 1973) with Christopher Isherwood, who for a time, Auden considered him to be his mentor, traveling companion, occasional writing partner, and possibly sometime lover.
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In 1935 he entered into what was then known as a lavender marriage (a marriage of convenience, often by or between gay and lesbians) to the lesbian German actress and writer, Erika Mann, in order that she could obtain British citizenship, and a UK passport, so that she would not have to return to Nazi Germany, and also allowing her to move to the United States. They never lived together, but remained close friends and technically married until Erika's death in 1969.
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Taught at the University of Michigan from 1941 to 1942.
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Bought his first home in 1958.
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Was rejected for service in the U.S. Army for Health reasons.
Originally scheduled to co-write the lyrics for "Man of La Mancha" with Chester Kallman. Both he and Kallman dropped out of the project when they and librettist Dale Wasserman disagreed about the point of view they should take when writing songs for Don Quixote to sing. Auden and Kallman did write some lyrics for the show, but they were entirely scrapped, and Joe Darion was hired instead.
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Longtime romantic companion and sometime writing collaborator of Chester Kallman.
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He was a long-time friend and frequent correspondent of J.R.R. Tolkien (although they rarely saw each other).
$14 Million
