W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden (York, 1907 – Vienna, 1973) was a poet and essayist who began life as a British writer and became an American citizen in 1946, keeping his British nationality as well. He wrote in English for most of the twentieth century, and his work is among the most influential in that language. He matters for the range of tones, forms and subjects with which he renewed poetry in his time.

He was born in York but grew up in and around Birmingham, in a professional middle-class family with a strong tradition of Anglican clergy. His father was a physician who taught public health. From the age of eight he went to boarding schools, and at Gresham's he decided that he wanted to be a poet. In 1925 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, on a scholarship in biology, but switched to English and became interested in Old English poetry through the lectures of J. R. R. Tolkien. He left the university in 1928 with a third-class degree.

He spent nine months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929, where the political and economic unrest he saw there became one of his lasting themes. Back in Britain he worked as a tutor and then, from 1930 to 1935, as a schoolmaster at boys' schools. That same year T. S. Eliot agreed to publish his first book, Poems, with Faber and Faber, the firm that remained his British publisher. His early poems alternated a clipped, modern, telegraphic style with a fluent, more traditional one, and this gave him a reputation that bordered on the prophetic.

In 1935 he married Erika Mann, daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann, in a marriage of convenience that allowed her to obtain British nationality and leave Nazi Germany. Both of them were homosexual, and they never lived together. During the 1930s he collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood, and in 1937 he travelled to Spain to support the Republic, returning with the poem Spain. In 1939 he settled in the United States, where his work turned towards religious and dramatic themes.

His output includes roughly four hundred poems, several of them long, as well as more than four hundred essays and reviews on literature, history, politics and music. His central subjects are personal love, politics and citizenship, religion and morality, and the relation between the individual and the natural world. He worked with forms ranging from the traditional ballad to the haiku. When he prepared his final collections, he rewrote or dropped some of his best-known poems, among them Spain and September 1, 1939, because he judged that they voiced opinions he had never truly held, even though he had used them for their rhetorical force.

In 1947 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Age of Anxiety, a long poem whose title became a common phrase for the modern era. From 1956 to 1961 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He is now regarded as one of the great English-language poets of the twentieth century, placed alongside Yeats and Eliot, although critical opinion of him has swung between dismissal and warm praise. After his death, his poems reached a far wider audience through film, radio and other media.