W. H. Auden
W.H. Auden
From the Library of Congress
Born
Died
February 21, 1907
York, England
29 September 1973 (aged 66)
Vienna, Austria
Nationality British from birth; American from 1946
Ethnicity
English
Education
M.A. English language and literature
Alma mater Christ Church, Oxford
Occupation Poet
Relatives
George Augustus Auden (father), Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden (mother), George
Bernard Auden (brother), John Bicknell Auden (brother)
Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973, pronounced /ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː
ˈɔːdən/)[1] who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,[2][3] born in England,
later an American citizen, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. [4]
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.[5][6] The 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.
Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle class family and read English literature
at Christ Church, Oxford. 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. 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 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. 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.[7]
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. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. 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.[4]
Life
Childhood
Auden was born in York, England, to George Augustus Auden, a physician, and Constance
Rosalie Bicknell Auden, who had trained (but never served) as a missionary nurse.[8] 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. 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.[9][10] He traced
his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood.[11] He believed he
was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas
is visible throughout his work.[12]
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. From the age of eight he attended boarding
schools, returning home for holidays.[9] His visits to the Pennine landscape and its declining leadmining 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."[13] Until he was fifteen
he expected to become a mining engineer, but his passion for words had already begun. He wrote
later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than
a living person can do."[14]
Education
Auden's first boarding school was St. Edmund's School, Surrey, where he met Christopher
Isherwood, later famous in his own right as a novelist. 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.[9] 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).[15] In school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming
of the Shrew in 1922,[16] and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his last year at Gresham's.[17] His
first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923.[18] Auden later wrote a chapter
on Gresham's for Graham Greene's The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (1934).[19]
In 1925 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology, but he switched to
English by his second year. 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. Auden left
Oxford in 1928 with a third-class degree.[9][11]
He was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925; for the next few years Isherwood was his
literary mentor to whom he sent poems for comments and criticism. Auden probably fell in love
with Isherwood and in the 1930s they maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their
relations with others. In 1935–39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.[20]
From his Oxford years onward, his friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant,
sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. In groups he was often dogmatic
and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident and shy except when
certain of his welcome. He was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines,
while choosing to live amidst physical disorder.[10]
Britain and Europe, 1928–1938
In the autumn of 1928 Auden left Britain for nine months in Berlin, partly to rebel against
English repressiveness. In Berlin, he said, he first experienced the political and economic unrest
that became one of his central subjects.[11]
On returning to Britain in 1929, he worked briefly as a tutor. In 1930 his first published book,
Poems (1930), was accepted by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber; the firm also published all his
later books. In 1930 he began five years as a schoolmaster in boys' schools: two years at the
Larchfield Academy, in Helensburgh, Scotland, then three years at The Downs School, in the
Malvern Hills, where he was a much-loved teacher.[9] At the Downs, in June 1933, he
experienced what he later described as a "Vision of Agape," when, while sitting with three
fellow-teachers at the school, he suddenly found that he loved them for themselves, that their
existence had infinite value for him; this experience, he said, later influenced his decision to
return to the Anglican Church in 1940.[21]
During these years, Auden's erotic interests focused, as he later said, on an idealized "Alter
Ego"[22] rather than on individual persons. His relations (and his unsuccessful courtships) tended
to be unequal either in age or intelligence; his sexual relations were transient, although some
evolved into long friendships. He contrasted these relations with what he later regarded as the
"marriage" (his word) of equals that he began with Chester Kallman in 1939 (see below), based
on the unique individuality of both partners.[23]
From the G.P.O. Film Unit's Night Mail; scene possibly directed by Auden
From 1935 until he left Britain early in 1939, Auden worked as freelance reviewer, essayist, and
lecturer, first with the G.P.O. Film Unit, a documentary film-making branch of the post office,
headed by John Grierson. Through his work for the Film Unit in 1935 he met and collaborated
with Benjamin Britten, with whom he also worked on plays, song cycles, and a libretto. Auden's
plays in the 1930s were performed by the Group Theatre, in productions that he supervised to
varying degrees.[11]
His work now reflected his belief that any good artist must be "more than a bit of a reporting
journalist."[24] In 1936 he spent three months in Iceland, where he gathered material for a travel
book Letters from Iceland (1937), written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice. In 1937 he
went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but
was put to work broadcasting propaganda, a job he left in order to visit the front. His 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.[9][23] Again attempting to
combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 visiting the SinoJapanese War, working on their book Journey to a War (1939). On their way back to England
they stayed briefly in New York and decided to move to the United States. Auden spent the
autumn of 1938 partly in England, partly in Brussels.[9]
Many of his poems during the 1930s and afterward were inspired by unconsummated love, and
in the 1950s he summarized his emotional life in a famous couplet: "If equal affection cannot be
/ Let the more loving one be me" ("The More Loving One"). He had a gift for friendship and,
starting in the late 1930s, a strong wish for the stability of marriage; in a letter to his friend James
Stern he called marriage "the only subject."[25] Throughout his life, he performed charitable acts,
sometimes in public (as in his marriage of convenience to Erika Mann in 1935 that gave her a
British passport with which to escape the Nazis[9]), but, especially in later years, more often in
private, and he 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.[26]
United States and Europe, 1939–1973
Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York in January 1939, entering on temporary visas. Their
departure from Britain was later seen by many there as a betrayal and Auden's reputation
suffered.[9] In April 1939 Isherwood moved to California, and he and Auden saw each other only
intermittently in later years. Around this time, Auden met the poet Chester Kallman, who
became his lover for the next two years (Auden described their relation as a "marriage" that
began with a cross-country "honeymoon" journey).[27] In 1941 Kallman ended their sexual
relations because he could not accept Auden's insistence on a mutual faithful relationship, but he
and Auden remained companions for the rest of Auden's life, sharing houses and apartments
from 1953 until Auden's death. Auden dedicated both editions of his collected poetry (1945/50
and 1966) to Isherwood and Kallman.[28]
Christopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden (right) photographed by Carl Van Vechten,
February 6, 1939
In 1940–41, Auden lived in a house in Brooklyn Heights which he shared with Carson
McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others, and which became a famous center of artistic life.[29] In
1940, he joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned
at thirteen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles
Williams,[30] whom he had met in 1937, partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold
Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life.[31]
After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939 Auden told the British embassy in
Washington that he would return to the UK if needed, but was told that, among those his age
(32), only qualified personnel were needed. In 1941–42 he taught English at the University of
Michigan. He was called up to be drafted in the United States Army in August 1942, but was
rejected on medical grounds. He had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1942-43, but
did not use it, choosing instead to teach at Swarthmore College in 1942–45.[9]
In the summer of 1945, after the end of World War II in Europe, he was in Germany with the U.
S. Strategic Bombing Survey, studying the effects of Allied bombing on German morale, an
experience that affected his postwar work as his visit to Spain had affected him earlier.[28] On his
return, he settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer, and as a lecturer at The New
School for Social Research and a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American
colleges. In 1946 he became a naturalized citizen of the US.[9][11]
His theology in his later years evolved from a highly inward and psychologically oriented
Protestantism in the early 1940s to 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 rejected "childish" conceptions of God for an adult religion that
focused on the significance of human suffering.[28][31]
Auden began summering in Europe in 1948, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house, then,
starting 1958, in Kirchstetten, Austria where he bought a farmhouse, and, he said, shed tears of
joy at owning a home for the first time.[9]
In 1951, shortly before the two British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the USSR,
Burgess attempted to phone Auden to arrange a vacation visit to Ischia that he had earlier
discussed with Auden; Auden never returned the call and had no further contact with either spy,
but a media frenzy ensued in which his name was mistakenly associated with their escape. The
frenzy was repeated when the MI5 documents on the incident were released in 2007.[32][33]
In 1956–61, Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University where he was required to give
three lectures each year. This fairly light workload allowed him to continue to winter in New
York, where he now lived on St. Mark's Place, and to summer in Europe, spending only three
weeks each year lecturing in Oxford. He now earned his income mostly by readings and lecture
tours, and by writing for The New Yorker and other magazines.[11]
During his last years, his conversation became repetitive, to the disappointment of friends who
had known him earlier as a witty and wide-ranging conversationalist.[9][34] In 1972, he moved his
winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a
cottage, but he continued to summer in Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973 and was buried in
Kirchstetten.[9]
Work
Overview
Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them booklength). His poetry was encyclopedic 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.[7] The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to
complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from
contemporary crises to the evolution of society.[4][23]
He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics,
music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood
and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, 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. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: "collaboration has brought me greater
erotic joy . . . than any sexual relations I have had."[35]
Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared
his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or
"dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views that he had never held but had used only
because he felt they would be rhetorically effective.[36] His rejected poems include "Spain" and
"September 1, 1939". His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to
Auden's Selected Poems that Auden's practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of
poetry and his reluctance to misuse it.[37] (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden
rejected and early texts of poems that he revised.)
Early work, 1922–1939
Cover of the privately-printed Poems (1928)
Up to 1930
Auden began writing poems at thirteen, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets,
especially Wordsworth, and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas Hardy. At
eighteen he discovered T. S. Eliot and adopted an extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his
own voice at twenty, when he wrote the first poem later included in his collected work, "From
the very first coming down."[23] This and other poems of the late 1920s tended to be in a clipped,
elusive style that alluded to, but did not directly state, their themes of loneliness and loss. Twenty
of these poems appeared in his first book Poems (1928), a pamphlet hand-printed by Stephen
Spender.[38]
In 1928 he wrote his first dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides, subtitled "A Charade," which
combined style and content from the Icelandic sagas with jokes from English school life. This
mixture of tragedy and farce, with a dream play-within-the-play, introduced the mixed styles and
content of much of his later work.[7] This drama and thirty short poems appeared in his first
published book Poems (1930, 2nd edition with seven poems replaced, 1933); the poems in the
book were mostly lyrical and gnomic mediations on hoped-for or unconsummated love and on
themes of personal, social, and seasonal renewal; among these poems were "It was Easter as I
walked," "Doom is dark," "Sir, no man's enemy," and "This lunar beauty."[23]
A recurrent theme in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts", Auden's term for the
powerful, unseen psychological effects of preceding generations on any individual life (and the
title of a poem). A parallel theme, present throughout his work, is the contrast between biological
evolution (unchosen and involuntary) and the psychological evolution of cultures and individuals
(voluntary and deliberate even in its subconscious aspects).[7][23]
1931 to 1935
Auden's next large-scale work was The Orators: An English Study (1932; revised editions, 1934,
1966), in verse and prose, largely about hero-worship in personal and political life. In his shorter
poems, his style became more open and accessible, and the exuberant "Six Odes" in The Orators
reflect his new interest in Robert Burns.[7] During the next few years, many of his poems took
their form and style from traditional ballads and popular songs, and also from expansive classical
forms like the Odes of Horace, which he seems to have discovered through the German poet
Hölderlin.[23] Around this time his main influences were Dante, William Langland, and
Alexander Pope.[39]
Programme of a Group Theatre production of The Dance of Death, with unsigned synopsis by
Auden
During these years, much of his work expressed left-wing views, and he became widely known
as a political poet, although his work was more politically ambivalent than many reviewers
recognized.[23] He 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.[10] His verse drama The Dance of Death (1933) was a political extravaganza in the style of
a theatrical revue, which Auden later called "a nihilistic leg-pull."[40] His next play The Dog
Beneath the Skin (1935), written in collaboration with Isherwood, was similarly a quasi-Marxist
updating of Gilbert and Sullivan in which the general idea of social transformation was more
prominent than any specific political action or structure.[7][23]
The Ascent of F6 (1937), another play written with Isherwood, was partly an anti-imperialist
satire, partly (in the character of the self-destroying climber Michael Ransom) an examination of
Auden's own motives in taking on a public role as a political poet.[23] This play included the first
version of "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), written as a satiric eulogy for a politician;
Auden later rewrote the poem as a "Cabaret Song" about lost love (written to be sung by the
soprano Hedli Anderson for whom he wrote many lyrics in the 1930s).[41] In 1935, he worked
briefly on documentary films with the G.P.O. Film Unit, writing his famous verse commentary
for Night Mail and lyrics for other films that were among his attempts in the 1930s to create a
widely-accessible, socially-conscious art.[7][23][41]
1936 to 1939
These tendencies in style and content culminate in his collection Look, Stranger! (1936; his
British publisher chose the title, which Auden hated; Auden retitled the 1937 US edition On This
Island).[23] This book included political odes, love poems, comic songs, meditative lyrics, and a
variety of intellectually intense but emotionally accessible verse. Among the poems included in
the book, connected by themes of personal, social, and evolutionary change and of the
possibilities and problems of personal love, were "Hearing of harvests", "Out on the lawn I lie in
bed", "O what is that sound", "Look, stranger, on this island now" (later revised versions change
"on" to "at"), and "Our hunting fathers."[7][23]
Auden was now arguing that an artist should be a kind of journalist, and he put this view into
practice in Letters from Iceland (1937) a travel book in prose and verse written with Louis
MacNeice, which included his long social, literary, and autobiographical commentary "Letter to
Lord Byron."[42] In 1937, after observing the Spanish Civil War he wrote a politically-engaged
pamphlet poem Spain (1937); he later discarded it from his collected works. Journey to a War
(1939) a travel book in prose and verse, was written with Isherwood after their visit to the SinoJapanese War.[42] Auden's last collaboration with Isherwood was their third play, On the
Frontier, an anti-war satire written in Broadway and West End styles.[11][23]
Auden's themes in his shorter poems now included the fragility and transience of personal love
("Danse Macabre", "The Dream", "Lay your sleeping head"), a theme he treated with ironic wit
in his "Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson" (which included "O Tell Me the Truth
About Love" and the revised version of "Funeral Blues"), and also the corrupting effect of public
and official culture on individual lives ("Casino", "School Children", "Dover").[7][23] In 1938 he
wrote a series of dark, ironic ballads about individual failure ("Miss Gee", "James Honeyman",
"Victor"). All these appeared in his next book of verse, Another Time (1940), together with other
famous poems such as "Dover", "As He Is", and "Musée des Beaux Arts" (all written before he
moved to America in 1939), and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "The Unknown Citizen", "Law
Like Love", "September 1, 1939", and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (written in America).[7]
The elegies for Yeats and Freud are partly statements of Auden's anti-heroic theme, in which
great deeds are performed, not by unique geniuses whom others cannot hope to imitate, but by
otherwise ordinary individuals who were "silly like us" (Yeats) or of whom it could be said "he
wasn't clever at all" (Freud), and who became teachers of others, not awe-inspiring heroes.[23]
Middle period, 1940–1957
1940 to 1946
In 1940 Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year Letter", which appeared with
miscellaneous notes and other poems in The Double Man (1941). At the time of his return to the
Anglican Communion he began writing abstract verse on theological themes, such as "Canzone"
and "Kairos and Logos." Around 1942, as he became more comfortable with religious themes,
his verse became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly used the syllabic verse he learned
from the poetry of Marianne Moore.[28]
His recurring themes in this period included the artist's temptation to use other persons as
material for his art rather than valuing them for themselves ("Prospero to Ariel") and the
corresponding moral obligation to make and keep commitments while recognizing the
temptation to break them ("In Sickness and Health").[7][28] From 1942 through 1947 he worked
mostly on three long poems in dramatic form, each differing from the others in form and content:
"For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on
Shakespeare's The Tempest" (both published in For the Time Being, 1944), and The Age of
Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (published separately 1947).[28] The first two, with Auden's other
new poems from 1940–44, were included in his first collected edition, The Collected Poetry of
W. H. Auden (1945), with most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions.[7]
1947 to 1957
After completing The Age of Anxiety in 1946 he focused again on shorter poems, notably "A
Walk After Dark," "The Love Feast", and "The Fall of Rome."[28] Many of these evoked the
Italian village where he summered in 1948-57, and his next book, Nones (1951), had a
Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work. A new theme was the "sacred importance" of the
human body[43] in its ordinary aspect (breathing, sleeping, eating) and the continuity with nature
that the body made possible (in contrast to the division between humanity and nature that he had
emphasized in the 1930s); his poems on these themes included "In Praise of Limestone" and
"Memorial for the City."[7][28] In 1949 Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's
opera The Rake's Progress, and later collaborated on two libretti for operas by Hans Werner
Henze.[9][44]
Auden's first separate prose book was The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the
Sea (1950), based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature. [45]
Between 1949 and 1954 he worked on a sequence of seven Good Friday poems, "Horae
Canonicae", an encyclopedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history,
focused on the irreversible act of murder; the poem was also a study in cyclical and linear ideas
of time. While writing this, he also wrote a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to
nature, "Bucolics." Both sequences appeared in his next book, The Shield of Achilles (1955),
with other short poems, including the book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the
Unknown Soldier."[7][28]
Extending the themes of "Horae Canonicae", in 1955–56 he wrote a group of poems about
"history," the term he used to mean the set of unique events made by human choices, as opposed
to "nature," the set of involuntary events created by natural processes, statistics, and anonymous
forces such as crowds. These poems included "T the Great", "The Maker", and the title poem of
his next collection Homage to Clio (1960).[7][28]
Later work, 1958–1973
In the late 1950s Auden's style became less rhetorical while its range of styles increased. In
1958, having moved his summer home from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Good-bye to the
Mezzogiorno"; other poems from this period include "Dichtung und Wahrheit: An Unwritten
Poem", a prose poem about the relation between love and personal and poetic language, and the
contrasting "Dame Kind", about the anonymous impersonal reproductive instinct. These and
other poems, including his 1955–66 poems about history, appeared in Homage to Clio
(1960).[7][28]
His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as
Professor of Poetry in 1956–61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since
the mid-1940s.[28]
While translating the haiku and other verse in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings, Auden began
using haiku for many of his poems.[28] A sequence of fifteen poems about his house in Austria,
"Thanksgiving for a Habitat", appeared in About the House (1965), with other poems that
included his reflections on his lecture tours, "On the Circuit."[7] In the late 1960s he wrote some
of his most vigorous poems, including "River Profile" and two poems that looked back over his
life, "Prologue at Sixty" and "Forty Years On." All these appeared in City Without Walls (1969).
His lifelong passion for Icelandic legend culminated in his verse translation of The Elder Edda
(1969).[7][28]
He was commissioned in 1963 to write lyrics for the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, but
the producer rejected them as insufficiently romantic.[44] In 1971 Secretary-General of the United
Nations U Thant commissioned Auden to write the words, and Pablo Casals to compose the
music, for a "Hymn to the United Nations", but the work had no official status.[46]
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) was a kind of self-portrait made up of favorite
quotations with commentary, arranged in alphabetical order by subject. His last prose book was a
selection of essays and reviews, Forewords and Afterwords (1973).[9] His last books of verse,
Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the unfinished Thank You, Fog (published posthumously, 1974)
include reflective poems about language ("Natural Linguistics") and about his own aging ("A
New Year Greeting", "Talking to Myself", "A Lullaby" ["The din of work is subdued"]). His last
completed poem, in haiku form, was "Archeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring
themes in his later years.[28]
W. H. Auden, 1970
Reputation and influence
Auden's stature in modern literature has been disputed, with opinions ranging from that of Hugh
MacDiarmid, who called him "a complete wash-out", to the obituarist in The Times (London),
who wrote: "W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry . . . emerges as its
undisputed master."[47]
In his enfant terrible stage in the 1930s he was both praised and dismissed as a progressive and
accessible voice, in contrast to the politically nostalgic and poetically obscure voice of T. S.
Eliot. His departure for America in 1939 was hotly debated in Britain (once even in Parliament),
with some critics treating it as a betrayal, and the role of influential young poet passed to Dylan
Thomas, although defenders such as Geoffrey Grigson, in an introduction to a 1949 anthology of
modern poetry, wrote that Auden "arches over all." His stature was suggested by book titles such
as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes
(1972).[4]
In the US, starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden's regular stanzas set the
style for a whole generation of poets; John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s Auden "was the
modern poet."[47] His manner was so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the
Beat Generation was partly a reaction against his influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, some writers
(notably Philip Larkin and Randall Jarrell) lamented that Auden's work had declined from its
earlier promise.[47][48]
By the time of Auden's death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that "by the time of Eliot's death in 1965 ... a convincing
case could be made for the assertion that Auden was indeed Eliot's successor, as Eliot had
inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats died in 1939."[49] With some exceptions, British
critics tended to treat his early work as his best, while American critics tended to favor his
middle and later work. Unlike other modern poets, his reputation did not decline after his death,
and Joseph Brodsky wrote that his was "the greatest mind of the twentieth century."[6]
Auden's popularity and familiarity suddenly increased after his "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the
clocks") was read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994); subsequently, a
pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold more than 275,000
copies. After September 11, 2001, his poem "September 1, 1939" was widely circulated and
frequently broadcast.[47] Public readings and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in 2007 marked
his centenary year.[50]