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W. H. Auden

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File:Isherwoodauden.jpg
Christopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden (right), photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1939

Wystan Hugh Auden, known more commonly as W. H. Auden, (February 21, 1907 – September 29, 1973) was an English poet, often cited as one of the most influential of the 20th century. He spent the first part of his life in the United Kingdom, but emigrated to the United States in 1939, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1946.

Life

Childhood

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York where his father Dr George Augustus Auden was a general practitioner. Auden was the third of three children, all sons; the oldest, George Bernard Auden, became a farmer; the middle brother John Bicknell Auden became a distinguished geologist. His mother was Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden; she had taken an Honours Degree in French at London University and was training to be a missionary nurse when she met Auden's father. Both of Auden's grandfathers were Church of England clergymen; the Auden family household was Anglo-Catholic in its religious life, i.e. a "High" form of Anglicanism with doctrine and ritual similar to that of Roman Catholicism. Auden traced much of his love of music and language to the church services of his childhood.

When W. H. Auden was a year and a half old, the family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, where his father had a joint appointment as the first School Medical Officer for Birmingham and Professor of Public Health at the University of Birmingham. From the age of eight Auden was sent away to boarding schools, but returned to Harborne for the holidays. During World War I, when his father was a physician in the Army, the family home was rented out and the family stayed in rented rooms or travelled during the holidays.

Education

Auden's first school was St. Edmund's School (Hindhead), Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood. At 13 he went to Gresham's School in Norfolk. Until 1922 Auden expected to pursue a career as a mining engineer, and the abandoned lead mines of northern England were a "sacred landscape" for him. Then a school friend Robert Medley who was two years ahead of him, first suggested that he might write poetry. In a list written in a notebook Auden used in 1947, Medley's name is the first on an untitled list of his great loves; the others are Christopher Isherwood, Michael Yates, Chester Kallman, and Rhoda Jaffe; while writing the list Auden deleted other names, including William Coldstream, with whom he had no intimate relations. In the 1930s, when Medley and Rupert Doone founded the Group Theatre in London, Auden worked closely with them on productions of his own plays.

Auden's first poems appeared in 1923 in the school magazine The Gresham. Also in 1922, probably not long after he began writing poetry, Auden "discover[ed] that he has lost his faith" (Forewords and Afterwords, 1973, p. 517).

In 1925 Auden went to Christ Church, Oxford University, with a scholarship to study biology. He soon switched to Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), then to English language and literature. Nevill Coghill became his English tutor, and became a lifelong friend. Other friends whom Auden met at Oxford included Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender; among his teachers, he became friendly with the theologian Father Martin D'Arcy.

In a visit to London during Auden's first year at Oxford, another friend, A.S.T. Fisher, reintroduced him to Christopher Isherwood. Auden soon began using Isherwood as his literary mentor, and for the next few years submitted his poems to Isherwood for comments and criticism. Auden seems to have fallen in love with Isherwood, who may not have been aware of the intensity of Auden's feelings, and the two maintained an intermittent sexual friendship until 1939, although each was more intent on relations with others.

Auden was chosen by the publisher Basil Blackwell as co-editor of the annual Oxford Poetry collection in 1926 and 1927. His poetry and eccentricities made him a minor legend among his fellow undergraduates. During the General Strike in 1926 he drove a car for the Trades Unions Congress although, by his own account, he was then uninterested in politics. He left Oxford in 1928, with only a third-class degree.

European period

Auden's parents gave him an allowance that lasted until his twenty-second birthday, so he did not begin working for a living immediately after Oxford. In the autumn of 1928 he left Britain for about nine months in Weimar Berlin, preferring to rebel against English repressiveness in Berlin, where homosexuality was generally tolerated, rather than in the heterosexual atmosphere of Paris. In Berlin, he finished his first dramatic work Paid on Both Sides, a mixture of an Icelandic saga, English mummers play, and public-school humour.

In Berlin, Auden met John Layard, an English anthropologist whose theories (based on the American schoolmaster and educational theorist Homer Lane) briefly influenced his work. Auden's first experience of political and economic unrest occurred in Berlin, where he also encountered the plays of Bertolt Brecht which influenced his own drama in the 1930s (he collaborated with Brecht in 1946 on an adaptation of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi). Isherwood visited Auden for a few weeks in 1929, and later returned to live in Berlin (where Auden sometimes visited him) during the 1930s.

On returning to Britain in 1929, Auden briefly worked as a tutor in London. In 1930 his first published book, Poems, was accepted by T. S. Eliot on behalf of Faber & Faber, who remained his publishers for the rest of his life. In 1930 he began a five-year career as a schoolmaster at boys' schools. He taught for two years at the Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, Scotland, where he wrote most of his 1932 volume in prose and verse The Orators. Then he taught for three years at the The Downs School, near Great Malvern, where he was happier than he had been at Larchfield, and where he wrote some of his best-known early poems, including "Out on the lawn I lie in bed" (a poem occasioned by the "Vision of Agape" in June 1933 that he later described in his 1964 preface to the anthology The Protestant Mystics, ed. by Anne Fremantle).

At the Downs School Auden was a much-loved eccentric and lively teacher. In 1935 he composed a "Revue" for which he wrote the words and music, with miscellaneous scenes performed by everyone at the school. Also at the Downs in 1935, he also met Benjamin Britten who visited the school with the filmmaker Basil Wright who hoped that Auden and Britten might both work for the General Post Office Film Unit, which made documentary films under the leadership of John Grierson. Britten and Auden collaborated on films, plays, and other works during the next seven years.

Also the Downs School Auden met Michael Yates, a schoolboy with whom Auden fell in love. He took the youth (together with Peter Roger, a gardener at the Downs School with whom Auden was having an affair) on travels through Germany and Central Europe in the summer of 1934, when Yates was fifteen. In 1936 he discovered that Michael Yates was going on a school trip to Iceland and immediately booked passage there with his friend Louis MacNeice. After Yates' schoolmates returned, he stayed on with the two writers. Auden addressed a number of poems to Yates, although few can be identified definitively with him and not Benjamin Britten or others; two such poems are "A Bride in the Thirties" in 1936 (about the moral choices open to an as yet untouched beloved) and "Lullaby" ("Lay your sleeping head my love"), written in 1937, the first poem that records a sexual relationship between them. Auden encouraged Yates's interest in theatre and design, and helped him to enter the Yale School of Drama despite his lack of a first degree. Much later–at the age of eighty–Yates revealed the nature of their relationship and confirmed that their love had been mutual, speaking about the "contentment of our lives together."[1] Their friendship was life-long and included Yates' wife Marny, who both visited Auden annually in Austria in the last years of his life.

In 1935 Auden made a marriage of convenience to Erika Mann, lesbian daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann, in order to provide her with a British passport to escape the Third Reich. They shook hands after the ceremony and saw each other again only a few times, mostly in America during the early 1940s, but they remained friendly and never bothered to divorce. He translated some of the songs in a satiric revue that she performed in Europe and America in the late 1930s, and at her death, she left a small sum of money to Auden, evidently in gratitude to him.

After Auden left the Downs School in 1935 he worked mostly a freelancer for the next three years, first with The G.P.O. (General Post Office) Film Unit, an organization within the post office that made documentary films under the leadership of John Grierson. Auden had begun writing for the Unit while still at the Downs, when the filmmaker Basil Wright brought Benjamin Britten to visit in the hope that Auden and Britten might write words and music for projected G.P.O. films such as Night Mail. Britten and Auden collaborated on films, plays, and other works during the next seven years. During his five months at the Film Unit (in Soho Square, London) Auden became friendly with the painter William Coldstream (and told friends that he fell platonically in love with Coldstream, who was resolutely heterosexual). His discussions with Coldstream (partly recorded in a verse letter to Coldstream in Letters from Iceland) helped to focus his view that art should be in part a kind of journalism, with a close focus on the events of the real world. Auden left the Film Unit largely because he felt uncomfortable with the way its propagandistic goals distorted its journalistic ones.

In 1936, after spending the summer in Iceland, he and MacNeice collaborated on Letters from Iceland, a spoof travel book comprised mostly of verse and prose letters to the dead Lord Byron and to living friends and relations such as Erika Mann, Christopher Isherwood, William Coldstream and R. H. S. Crossman. Also in 1936 Auden published his second collection of shorter poems, titled Look, Stranger! in its British edition (a title chosen by the publishers while Auden was in Iceland) and On this Island in its American edition (1937).

In early 1937 Auden spent about six weeks in Spain observing the Spanish Civil War, an experience that affected him deeply in ways that he did not write about until many years later. Intending to work as a medical aide, he was briefly put to work writing and broadcasting propaganda from Valencia for the Spanish Republic. Like George Orwell he found that the political realities in Spain were more complex and troubling than he imagined, and while he continued to support the Republic, he was troubled by the falsehoods in its propaganda and that of its apologists. On his return he published a pamphlet poem Spain in support of the Republic; his royalties went to Medical Aid for Spain, a charity associated with the Republican side.

In 1938 Auden and Christopher Isherwood spent six months traveling to and from China to report on the Sino-Japanese War; they stayed briefly in New York on their way back to Britain, and decided to move to the United States. The poems that Auden wrote during their travels and Isherwood's travel-diary (which included material originally written by Auden) were published in their book Journey to a War. Auden and Isherwood spent the autumn of 1938 partly in England, where he gave talks on the Sino-Japanese War, partly in Brussels, where Auden wrote "Musée des Beaux Arts" [2] and other poems.

American period

Auden and Isherwood sailed from England to New York in January 1939, entering on temporary visas. This move away from Britain, nine months before the start of the Second World War, was seen by many in Britain as a betrayal and his reputation suffered as a result. Soon after arriving in New York, he gave a public reading with Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, at which he met the eighteen year old poet Chester Kallman for the first time. Kallman was to be his lover for the next two years and remained his companion for the rest of his life. The two shared houses and apartments for most of the period from 1953 until Auden's death in 1973, though the relationship was often troubled. In April 1939 Isherwood moved to California, and he and Auden saw each other only intermittently in later years.

In the autumn of 1939 Auden moved to an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and a year later to a house a few streets away which he shared with the magazine editor George Davis, Carson McCullers, and others at varying times, including Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, and Richard Wright.

In 1940, he returned to the Anglican faith of his childhood when he joined the Episcopal Church in the United States of America; he was influenced in this reconversion partly through reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr. The process of his conversion is reflected in the changing attitudes found in the course of his long poem New Year Letter and other poems that he included in his book The Double Man in 1941 (title of the UK edition, New Year Letter).

His conversion influenced his work significantly as he explored the parable and Christian-allegorical readings of Shakespeare's plays. He regarded his sexuality as a sin that he would continue to commit, sometimes alluding to Augustine's prayer, "make me chaste, Lord, but not yet." His theology in his later years evolved from a highly inward and psychologically-oriented Protestantism in the early 1940s through a more Roman Catholic-oriented interest in the significance of the body and in collective ritual in the later 1940s and 1950s, and finally to the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer which states that the belief in a purely supernatural God needed to be supplemented by the idea of a God who is experienced and manifested in the community of the church; Auden memorialized Bonhoeffer in his poem "Friday's Child". In America, "his own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians."[3]

In 1941-42 Auden taught English at the University of Michigan, then from 1942 through 1945 he taught at Swarthmore College. During these years he wrote two long poems in dramatic form: For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio and The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the summer of 1945 he was in Germany with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, studying the effects of Allied bombing on German morale, an experience that left him shaken and about which he said little; the experience is reflected in his description of a war-torn city in his 1949 poem Memorial for the City.

After this, he lived mostly in New York, working as a freelance writer and sometimes teaching courses as a visiting professor at American colleges. From 1944 through early 1947 he worked on the third and last of the three long poems in dramatic form that he wrote in the 1940s, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue.

Since the early 1940s Auden had been friendly with an American woman, Rhoda Jaffe, whom he met through Chester Kallman (she had been married to the writer Milton Klonsky, and was the last of the names on the list of great loves that he wrote in a notebook in 1947), and with whom he had an intermittent and intense affair between 1945 and 1948.[4] She was the model for the character Rosetta in his long poem The Age of Anxiety.

Having spent the war years in the United States, Auden became a naturalized citizen in 1946, but returned to Europe during the summers starting in 1948, first in Italy then in Austria. From 1956 to 1961, Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a post which required him to give only three lectures each year, so he spent only a few weeks at Oxford during his professorship. During the last year of his life he moved back from New York to Oxford, but again summered in Austria. His last public appearance was a reading at the Palais Palffy in Vienna on 28 September 1973; he died in Vienna in 1973 later the same night or early the next morning. He was buried near his summer home in Kirchstetten, Austria.

Work

Auden thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, and the core of his work are the more than three hundred shorter poems and six longer poems that he chose to preserve in his later collected editions. His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in form from limericks and doggerel to a "Christmas Oratorio," a baroque eclogue; ranging in style from the cliches of pop songs to complex philosophical meditations, and ranging in subject-matter from the corns on his toes to the evolution of European society.

As a poet, Auden "has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information."[5]

Auden wrote a considerable body of criticism and essays as well as co-authoring some drama with his friend Christopher Isherwood, but he is primarily known as a poet. Auden's work is characterised by exceptional variety, ranging from such rigorous traditional forms as the villanelle to original yet intricate forms, as well as the technical and verbal skills Auden displayed regardless of form. He was also partly responsible for re-introducing Anglo-Saxon accentual meter to English poetry, particularly during the 1930s. An area of controversy is the extent to which Auden reworked poems in successive publications, and dropped several of his best-known poems from collected editions because he no longer felt they were honest or accurate. His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, makes the case in his introduction to Auden's Selected Poems that this was in fact an affirmation of Auden's serious belief in the power and importance of poetry. The Selected Poems include some of the verse Auden rejected, and early versions of some which he later revised.

Auden always saw himself as a northerner and had a lifelong allegiance to the high limestone moorland of the North Pennines in Durham, Northumberland and Cumbria, in particular the poignant remains of the once-thriving lead mining industry. Auden called it his 'Mutterland' and his 'great good place'. Auden first went north (to Rookhope, County Durham) in 1919 and the Pennine landscapes excited a Wordsworthian visionary intensity in the twelve-year-old Wystan.

From 1921 Auden often stayed at his parents' cottage atThrelkeld near Keswick in Cumbria, and some forty of the poems of the 1920s and 1930s and two influential plays Paid on Both Sides and The Dog Beneath the Skin are set in the North Pennines. The 1922 epiphany when Auden first became conscious of himself as a creative artist, occurred at Rookhope, when he dropped a stone down a flooded mineshaft.

In her introduction to Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928 (1994), Katherine Bucknell traces themes relating to Auden's career and describes important aspects of his years at Gresham's School and Christ Church, Oxford, highlighting his instinct for experimentation and the testing of tradition.

References to the North Pennine area, and lead mining, occur constantly throughout Auden’s later life in both prose and verse, most notably in the poems "New Year Letter" (1940); "The Age of Anxiety" (1947); "Amor Loci" (1965) and "Prologue at Sixty" (1967), wherein he calls himself a "Son of the North", as well as the magazine article, printed in Vogue in 1954, "England: Six Unexpected Days", a suggested driving itinerary mostly through the Pennine Dales.

Before he turned to Anglicanism Auden took an active interest in left-wing political controversies of his day and some of his greatest work reflects these concerns, such as "Spain", a poem on the Spanish Civil War, and "September 1, 1939", on the outbreak of World War II; both poems were later repudiated by Auden and excluded from his Collected Poems. Other memorable works include his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, the poems "The Unknown Citizen", "Musée des Beaux-Arts", and poems on the deaths of William Butler Yeats and Sigmund Freud. Auden's ironic love poem "Funeral Blues" (originally a parody written for The Ascent of F6 with music by Benjamin Britten and sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson) was movingly read in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral. Before this, Auden's work was famously used in the GPO Film Unit's documentary film Night Mail, for which he wrote a verse commentary.

Auden was often thought of as part of a group of like-minded writers including Edward Upward, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice (with whom he collaborated on Letters from Iceland in 1936), Cecil Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender, although he himself stopped thinking of himself as part of a group after about the age of 24. He also collaborated closely with composers, writing an operetta libretto for Benjamin Britten, and, in collaboration with Chester Kallman, a libretto for Igor Stravinsky (The Rake's Progress) and two libretti for Hans Werner Henze. Also with Kallman, he provided translations of The Seven Deadly Sins, a ballet-chanté by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, as well as of their full-length epic opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. (They also translated Mozart's The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni for the early television program "NBC Opera Theater.")

Auden was a frequent correspondent and longtime friend (although they rarely saw each other) of J.R.R. Tolkien, who died three weeks before Auden. He was among the most prominent early critics to praise The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter, "I am... very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it."

His 1947 poem "The Age of Anxiety" provided the basis of a Symphony by Leonard Bernstein; the symphony includes no vocal music, but the mood and themes of the movements were suggested by the poem.

His poem "Hymn to the United Nations" was commissioned by the United Nations Secretary-General U Thant who also commissioned a setting for the poem by Pablo Casals; Casals conducted the first performance in 1971, but the work was never adopted officially by the United Nations.

With Leif Sjöberg, Auden translated 66 of the Swedish poet Pär Lagerkvist's poems.

His poem "Victor" served as the basis for a song of the same name on Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson's 1996 solo album, also titled Victor.

Auden Quotations

  • "Poetry makes nothing happen." (In Memory of W.B. Yeats, 1939)
  • "A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."
  • "A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects."
  • "Thoughts of his own death, / like the distant roll / of thunder at a picnic." (a haiku, originally in three lines)
  • "I am very puzzled when they ask for student participation, because later in life, when one sins, one has to sit on committees. If they knew what it is like to sit on committees, how very boring it is... Thank God when I was a student nobody ever asked me to be on a committee!" (from seminar at Swarthmore College, 1971)
  • "Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods."
  • "When I was a student, contemporary literature was something we looked at for ourselves and I think we were reasonably informed. We wouldn't have dreamt of going to a teacher and saying, 'We want to have a course.' " (also from seminar at Swarthmore College, 1971)
  • "Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another."
  • "Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do."
  • "God bless the USA, / So large, so friendly, and so rich." (from the poem "On the Circuit")
  • "My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain."
  • "There is no love; / There are only the various envies, all of them sad." (In Praise of Limestone, 1948)
  • "I am losing patience / With my personal relations. / They are not deep / And they are not cheap." (Shorts, 1930)
  • "In the prison of his days, / Teach the free man how to praise." (In Memory of W.B. Yeats, 1939)
  • "About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters ... They never forgot / That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course / Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree." (Musee des Beaux-Arts, 1938)
  • "The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed, / And the crack in the teacup opens / A lane to the land of the dead." (As I Walked out One Evening, 1937)

Published works

Notes

  1. ^ Louise Jury, "Auden's schoolboy inspiration tells the truth about their love"; Independent, The (London), Mar 19, 2000
  2. ^ http://poetrypages.lemon8.nl/life/musee/museebeauxarts.htm
  3. ^ http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/120 Auden bio at Poets.org
  4. ^ Biographies by Carpenter and Davenport-Hines.
  5. ^ http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/120 Auden bio at Poets.org

Bibliography

  • Bahlke, G. W., The Later Auden (1970)
  • Bloomfield, B. C., and Edward Mendelson, W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924-1969 (1972)
  • Bold, Alan ed., W. H. Auden: The Far Interior (1985)
  • Callan, Edward, Auden: A Carnival of Intellect (1983)
  • Carpenter, Humphrey, W. H. Auden: A Biography (1981)
  • Clark, Thekla, Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (1996)
  • Davenport-Hines, Richard, Auden (1995)
  • Farnan, D. J., Auden in Love (1984)
  • Gingerich, M. E., W. H. Auden: A Reference Guide (1978)
  • Greenberg, Herbert, Quest for the Necessary: W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness (1968)
  • Haffenden, John, ed., W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage (1983)
  • Hecht, Anthony, The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993)
  • Kirsch, Arthur, Auden and Christianity (2005)
  • Levy, Alan, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety (1983)
  • McDiarmid, Lucy, Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the Wars (1984)
  • Mendelson, Edward, The Early Auden (1981)
  • Mendelson, Edward, ed., W. H. Auden: Plays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988)
  • Mendelson, Edward, ed., W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1991)
  • Mendelson, Edward, Later Auden (1999)
  • Page, Norman, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (2000)
  • Rodway, Allan, Preface to Auden (1984)
  • Rowse, A. L., The Poet Auden (1988)
  • Wright, G. T., W. H. Auden, rev. ed. (1981)
  • Poem: September 1939
  • Fourteen poems of Auden
  • Auden's poem, Musee des Beaux Arts with notes
  • The W.H. Auden Society
  • W. H. Auden at Swarthmore
  • Auden's Grave
  • A biography of Auden
  • Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
  • Auden and the North
  • BBC audio interviews
  • Newman, Michael (1974). "W. H. Auden: The Art of Poetry No. 17 (interview)". The Paris Review. Retrieved 2006-07-11.

See also

Wikiquote has quotations related to W. H. Auden.
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