Wystan Hugh Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (February 21st 1907 - September 29th 1973) is a poet and critical British, largely considered as one of most important and influential of the 20th century. It passed the first part of its life to the the United Kingdom, then emigrated with the the United States in 1939 and became American citizen in 1946.

Its life

Auden was born with York and passed the beginning of its childhood with Harborne, Birmingham, where his/her father Dr. George Auden was professor of public health at the university of Birmingham. As of the eight years age it is sent in pension, initially in the Surrey, then with the Gresham' S School of Norfolk.

He studies then in Christ Church, Université of Oxford, then he will live during one year with Berlin at the time of the Weimar Republic, from which the atmosphere of tolerance is more favorable to the open expression of its homosexuality. Of return to the the United Kingdom, he teaches in two schools of boys of 1930 to 1935. Most important, and where it is happiest, is Downs School, close to Great Malvern, where it spends three years and writes some of the most beautiful poems of love of the beginning of its work, such as This lunar beauty , Lay your sleeping head, my coils , Fish in the unruffled lakes and Out one the lawn I binds in bed .

In 1935 Auden makes a marriage of convenience with Erika Mann, girl lesbian of the German great writer Thomas Mann, in order to get for this one a British passport enabling him to escape the Third Reich. Although the " couple" never lived together, they remained friendly and never took the trouble to divorce.

Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrate in the USA in 1939. This departure of the United Kingdom, just at the time when the Second world war starts, is largely seen like a treason and the poetic reputation of Auden briefly suffers from it. Shortly after its arrival in New York, it gives a public reading with Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, where it meets for the first time the poet Chester $kalman, who becomes his lover and companion for the remainder of his life, although this relation is often stormy.

Having spent the years of war in the United States, Auden is naturalized American citizen in 1946, but turns over to Europe in summer as from 1948, initially to Italy then to Austria. Of 1956 to 1961 Auden is professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, a station which requires only its share to give three conferences per annum, so that it spends only a few weeks to Oxford during this period. During the last year of its life it returns from New York to Oxford, and dies in Vienna in 1973.

Its work

Auden wrote a considerable quantity of works of criticism and tests as well as plays in collaboration with his/her friend Christopher Isherwood, but it is especially known as a poet. The work of Auden is characterized by an exceptional variety going from rigorous traditional forms such as the Villanelle with original and complex forms with the technical skill which it deploys whatever the form employed. It was also responsible partly for the return to the Anglo-Saxon meter accentuated in English poetry. There exists a controversy the fact that Auden worked over again its poems in their successive publications and made remove several of its most known poems of the later editions because it found any more them exact neither sincere nor. Its literary executor, Edward Mendelson, affirm in his introduction to the selected Poèmes of Auden that it is there is of it a proof of its faith in the capacity and the importance of poetry. This collection includes/understands some towards Auden had rejected and of the initial versions of those which it had then modified.

Before becoming Anglican (in a version of the Anglicanism nearer to the Protestantism than the Catholicism of his/her parents), Auden had actively been interested in the political debates of the left of its time and some of its works reflect these concerns, like Spain , a poem on the Spanish Civil war, and September 1,1939 on the release of the Second world war (two poems repudiated later on by Auden and excluded from its Collected Poems ). Among his other works one also notes his oratorio of Christmas, For the Time Being , The Unknown Citizen , Musée of the Art schools , and the worms on the death of William Butler Yeats and Sigmund Freud. The poem of love Funeral Blues (written at the origin to be sung by a soprano of its friends, Hedli Anderson) was read in a way moving in film of 1994 Four marriages and a burial .

Auden is often evoked like pertaining to a group of writers of common inspiration, among which one finds Edward Upward, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice (with which it collaborated in the Letters from Iceland in 1936), Cecil Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender, although itself ceased being regarded as member of this group as of the 24 years age. He also collaborated narrowly with type-setters, writing a booklet of opera for Benjamin Britten, and, in collaboration with Chester $kalman, a booklet for Igor Stravinski and two others for Hans Werner Henze.

Quotations

Evil is always unspectacular and always human. It sleeps in our bed and eats At our own table. (the evil is never spectacular and always human. He sleeps in our beds and eats with our tables.)

We are all young stag one earth to help others. What I can' T appears out is what the others are young stag for. (We all are here on Earth to help the others. What I do not include/understand this is why the others is here.)

Documentation

Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden: biography (1981) has
Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (1995)
Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (1981)
Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (1999)
Norman Page, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (2000)
Thekla Clark, Wystan and Chester: In Personal Memoir off W.H. Auden and Chester $kalman (1996)
Dorothy J. Farnan, Auden in Coils (1985)

External bonds

(to be supplemented)

The W.H. Auden Society
has off Biography Auden
Guardian Books " Author Page" , with a profile and bonds towards other articles.
audio Interviews of the BBC

Simple: W.H. Auden

Random links: