Poets and Poems

W. H. Auden

W.H. Auden was a seminal figure in the poetry and literature of the twentieth century.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in February 1907, the youngest of three children of George Auden and his wife Constance Bicknell. The family moved from York to Solihull, near Birmingham, when he was one,  and from the age of eight he was educated in boarding schools, at Hindhead in Surrey and Holt in Norfolk.

In 1925 he entered Christ Church, a constituent college of Oxford University, graduating in 1928 with a degree in English literature. While there he became influential among a politically left-leaning group of writers who including Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice; also Christopher Isherwood, whom he knew from Hindhead, and with whom he had an intermittent sexual relationship over many years.

In 1936, after a period of school teaching, he went to Iceland with the poet Louis MacNeice and they jointly published 'Letters from Iceland' (1937), a travel book in prose and verse. He then spent some weeks observing the Spanish Civil War and while there visited the front. The resulting poem 'Spain' (1937) shows something of the effect the experience had on him. In 1938 he went to China with Isherwood to report on the Sino-Japanese war. The resulting publication 'Journey to War' (1939) contained poems by Auden and prose mostly by Isherwood.

In January 1939 he and Isherwood left Britain for New York, by which time his literary reputation was well established*. He tried to return after war broke out that September, but his application to the British authorities was declined; at his age only those with experience were required. (By then Isherwood had moved to California, and in later years they saw each other only occasionally.)

During that year he met a young American poet, Chester Kalman, and they became lovers. He wrote many love poems to him, and spoke of their relationship as a marriage** (perhaps influenced by his return to Christian faith***; both his grandparents had been Anglican bishops.) His desire for fidelity was not reciprocated and their intense relationship ended some two years later. They nevertheless remained artistic collaborators and life-long friends.

His writings now became less political and more concerned with religious and spiritual themes. In 1948 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book length poem 'The Age of Anxiety'; the title phrase came to epitomise the post-war disquiet of a generation. His private life displayed a generosity that he was careful to keep secret. The manuscript of this important poem was discretely given to a friend to sell, because he needed an operation he could not afford.

In 1946 he became a naturalised American citizen. Although his home was still in Manhattan, from 1948 onwards he summered in Europe, firstly in Italy and later in Austria. His income came mainly from lecturing and from his prolific writing; as poet, playwright, essayist and literary reviewer. Appointed Professor of Poetry, from 1956 to 1961 he lectured for three weeks annually in Oxford. In 1972, in declining health, he moved his winter home to a cottage provided in the grounds by the University.

He died in his sleep in Vienna on the twenty-seventh of September 1973 from congestive heart failure. He is buried in Kirchstetten, the Alpine town that had been his summer home since 1958. There is a plaque of commemoration in the Poets' Corner of Westminter Abbey, London.

* Auden started composing poetry in his school days, and during the 1930s 'Faber and Faber' published many of his writings, starting with the volume entitled 'Poems' (1930), followed by 'The Orators' (1932), a verse play 'The Dance of Death' (1933) and several more works. By the time 'Another Time' was published in 1940 his reputation as a major poet and writer was secure.
** Auden's desire for the stability of marriage contrasted sharply with his earlier promiscuity, particularly during the nine hedonistic post-university months in 1929 that he spent with Isherwood in Berlin. He was in Berlin again in 1945 under very different circumstances, officially studying the effects of the Allied bombing on German morale. What he saw there affected him deeply.
*** Auden took his religious faith very seriously, but 'his version of Christianity was more or less incomprehensible to anyone who thought religion was about formal institutions .. or any other conventional aspect of personal or organised religion'. (Edward Mendelson in 'Auden and God'.)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/12/06/auden-and-god/

Lines from 'Lullaby' *

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreadful cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
* Dated Jan 1937, the year he travelled to Spain to observe the civil war.