![]() ![]() Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a third-class degree. Friends he met at Oxford included Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender these four were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. In 1925 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology, but he switched to English by his second year. Auden later wrote a chapter on Gresham's for Graham Greene's The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (1934). His first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923. In school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922, and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his last year at Gresham's. Soon after, he "discover(ed) that he (had) lost his faith" (through a gradual realisation that he had lost interest in religion, not through any decisive change of views). At thirteen he went to Gresham's School in Norfolk there, in 1922, when his friend Robert Medley asked him if he wrote poetry, Auden first realized his vocation was to be a poet. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do."Īuden's first boarding school was St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later famous in his own right as a novelist. His visits to the Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining industry figure in many of his poems the remote decaying mining village of Rookhope was for him a "sacred landscape", evoked in a late poem, "Amor Loci." Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his passion for words had already begun. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays. ![]() In 1908 his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas is visible throughout his work. He traced his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood. Auden's grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen he grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household which followed a "High" form of Anglicanism with doctrine and ritual resembling those of Roman Catholicism. He was the third of three children, all sons the eldest, George Bernard Auden, became a farmer, while the second, John Bicknell Auden, became a geologist. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") and "September 1, 1939", became widely known through films, broadcasts and popular media.Īuden was born at 54 Bootham, in York, England, to George Augustus Auden, a physician, and Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden, who had trained (but never served) as a missionary nurse. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. 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. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. W H AUDEN AGE OF ANXIETY PROFESSIONALThe 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.Īuden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. ![]() Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. ![]()
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