59 Facts About WH Auden

Wystan Hugh WH Auden was a British-American poet.

WH Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content.

WH Auden was born in York and grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family.

WH Auden attended various English independent schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford.

WH Auden taught from 1941 to 1945 in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s.

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WH Auden came to wide public attention with his first book Poems at the age of twenty-three in 1930; it was followed in 1932 by The Orators.

WH Auden moved to the United States partly to escape this reputation, and his work in the 1940s, including the long poems "For the Time Being" and "The Sea and the Mirror", focused on religious themes.

WH Auden won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1947 long poem The Age of Anxiety, the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era.

In 1939, WH Auden fell in love with Chester Kallman and regarded their relationship as a marriage, but this ended in 1941 when Kallman refused to accept the faithful relations that WH Auden demanded.

WH Auden was 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.

WH Auden was the third of three sons; the eldest, George Bernard Auden, became a farmer, while the second, John Bicknell Auden, became a geologist.

WH Auden traced his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood.

WH Auden believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas is evident in his work.

WH Auden's family moved to Homer Road in Solihull, near Birmingham, in 1908, where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer of Public Health.

WH Auden attended St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later famous in his own right as a novelist.

WH Auden's first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923.

WH Auden later wrote a chapter on Gresham's for Graham Greene's The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands .

WH Auden was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while choosing to live amidst physical disorder.

In late 1928, WH Auden left Britain for nine months, going to Berlin, perhaps partly as an escape from English repressiveness.

WH Auden contrasted these relationships with what he later regarded as the "marriage" of equals that he began with Chester Kallman in 1939, based on the unique individuality of both partners.

In 1935, WH Auden married Erika Mann, the lesbian novelist daughter of Thomas Mann when it became apparent that the Nazis were intending to strip her of her German citizenship.

WH Auden declined but suggested she approach Auden, who readily agreed to a marriage of convenience.

Mann and WH Auden never lived together, but remained on good terms throughout their lives and were still married when Mann died in 1969.

In 1936, WH Auden introduced actress Therese Giehse, Mann's lover, to the writer John Hampson and they too married so that Giehse could leave Germany.

From 1935 until he left Britain early in 1939, WH Auden worked as freelance reviewer, essayist, and lecturer, first with the GPO Film Unit, a documentary film-making branch of the post office, headed by John Grierson.

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WH Auden's plays in the 1930s were performed by the Group Theatre, in productions that he supervised to varying degrees.

In 1936, WH Auden spent three months in Iceland where he gathered material for a travel book Letters from Iceland, written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice.

WH Auden returned to England after a brief visit to the front at Sarinena.

WH Auden's 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.

WH Auden spent late 1938 partly in England, partly in Brussels.

WH Auden 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.

Around this time, WH Auden met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next two years .

WH Auden dedicated both editions of his collected poetry to Isherwood and Kallman.

In 1940, WH Auden joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at fifteen.

WH Auden's reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams, whom he had met in 1937, and partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life.

WH Auden was told that, among those his age, only qualified personnel were needed.

WH Auden was called for the draft in the United States Army in August 1942, but was rejected on medical grounds.

In 1948, WH Auden began spending his summers in Europe, together with Chester Kallman, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house.

WH Auden said that he shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first time.

WH Auden earned his income mostly from readings and lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines.

In 1963, Kallman left the apartment he shared in New York with WH Auden, and lived during the winter in Athens while continuing to spend his summers with WH Auden in Austria.

In February 1972, WH Auden moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage, while he continued to spend summers in Austria with Kallman.

WH Auden spent only one winter in Oxford before his death in 1973.

WH Auden was intending to return to Oxford the following day.

WH Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems .

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WH Auden's poetry was encyclopaedic 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.

WH Auden wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects.

WH Auden collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, and 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.

WH Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions.

WH Auden wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective.

WH Auden began writing poems in 1922, at fifteen, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas Hardy.

WH Auden found his own voice at twenty when he wrote the first poem later included in his collected work, "From the very first coming down".

WH Auden 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.

WH Auden was now arguing that an artist should be a kind of journalist, and he put this view into practice in Letters from Iceland 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 1940, WH Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year Letter", which appeared with miscellaneous notes and other poems in The Double Man .

WH Auden's last prose book was a selection of essays and reviews, Forewords and Afterwords .

WH Auden's last completed poem was "Archaeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later years.

WH Auden's stature was suggested by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes .

WH Auden was one of three candidates recommended by the Nobel Committee to the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963 and 1965 and six recommended for the 1964 prize.