12 - English - Selected poetry of W.H. Auden: Introduction

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. He studied to be a mining engineer, but by 1922 he was determined to make poetry his career. From 1925 to 1928 he attended Oxford University, where he won recognition as an outstanding young poet. After studying in Germany for a year, he worked as a schoolmaster in England and Scotland for five years.

Auden established his reputation with the volume Poems, published in 1930. His psychological insight was matched by his attacks on capitalism and totalitarianism in Look, Stranger! (1936) and other works. He collaborated with Christopher Isherwood on plays including The Ascent of F6 (1936). In the mid-1930s Auden married Erika Mann, daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann, in order to secure a British passport for her, but they never lived together. Auden moved to New York City in 1939 and became a U.S. citizen in 1946. In these years his commitment to Christianity deepened. He wrote the Christmas oratorio For the Time Being (1944) and won a Pulitzer prize for the poem The Age of Anxiety (1947). He spent much of his time in Italy and Austria and was a professor of poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1961.

In his later years Auden worked on opera libretti for several works, including Igor Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress (1951), while he was active as a poet, teacher, lecturer, and essayist. He died in Vienna, Austria, on September 28, 1973. (Britannica, 2016)