W. H. Auden Biography Quotes 60 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, on 21 February 1907, the youngest of three sons of George Augustus Auden, a physician, and Constance Rosalie Auden, a trained nurse. Soon after, the family moved to Birmingham, where his father became a prominent school medical officer. Industrial landscapes, northern mining country, and Anglican ritual all entered his imagination early. He attended Gresham's School in Norfolk, then went up to Christ Church, Oxford, first intending to study science before turning decisively to literature. At Oxford he met kindred spirits who would shape his career: Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Christopher Isherwood. With them he formed the nucleus of a generation that critics and journalists soon labeled the Auden Group.

Oxford and the Auden Generation
Auden emerged precociously as a poet with a voice at once private and public, daring in form and sharp in moral intelligence. His first collection, Poems (1930), announced a talent comfortable with half-rhymes, ballads, and angular, stress-based measures drawn from Old English and popular song. Through Spender and Isherwood he absorbed a commitment to contemporary life, to factories and suburbs no less than to myth. T. S. Eliot, an editor at Faber and Faber, encouraged Auden and helped usher his work into print, giving the young poet both a model of modernist discipline and a professional base in London. Auden and Isherwood soon became collaborators and close companions, experimenting with plays and travel writing that fused reportage and allegory.

Schoolmaster, First Books, and Experiments
After Oxford he worked as a schoolmaster, first in Scotland and later at the Downs School in England, where his eccentric charm and exacting standards made a lasting impression on pupils. These years produced The Orators (1932), a hybrid of prose and verse, and plays written with Isherwood, including The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6, which turned public events into symbolic theater. The poem known today as Funeral Blues, first written for dramatic context, displayed his gift for lyric clarity within collaborative projects. His anthology work, such as The Poet's Tongue (with John Garrett), testified to a wide, democratic sense of the English tradition.

Political Witness and Travel
The 1930s drew Auden into the turbulence of Europe. With Christopher Isherwood he traveled to Weimar and later to a threatened China, experiences distilled in their prose-and-verse Journey to a War. He went to Spain during the Civil War in 1937 and wrote Spain, a poem he later revised as his politics and ethics changed. His work from these years is marked by urgent civic speech and elegy: in 1939 he wrote In Memory of W. B. Yeats and In Memory of Sigmund Freud, meditations on art, authority, and loss. The documentary short Night Mail (1936), created with the GPO Film Unit, featured Auden's verses timed to the clatter of a postal train; Benjamin Britten provided the score, initiating a creative friendship between poet and composer.

Emigration, Faith, and American Years
In 1939 Auden left England for the United States, a move that surprised his British readers and reset his career. He settled in New York, became a U.S. citizen in 1946, and began to write with renewed theological and philosophical seriousness. He returned to the Anglican faith around 1940, reading Kierkegaard and others in search of a language for fallibility and grace. Another Time (1940) and New Year Letter (1941) framed his transatlantic transition. The Age of Anxiety (1947), a long, searching poem set in wartime New York, earned the Pulitzer Prize and lent its name to a broader postwar mood. He entered a lifelong partnership with the poet and librettist Chester Kallman, whose companionship and collaboration would shape both the poetry and the operatic work that followed.

Collaborations in Music and Theater
Auden believed poetry and music shared an ethics of form. With Benjamin Britten he wrote the libretto for Paul Bunyan, and his earlier verses for Night Mail remained a model of public art made with technical finesse. Later, with Kallman, he wrote the text for Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, bringing neoclassical poise to modern opera. Further collaborations with composers such as Hans Werner Henze yielded Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids, works that set Auden's cultivated irony against the intense energies of the stage. These partnerships integrated his gifts for dramatic voice, aphorism, and pattern, extending his influence well beyond the printed page.

Personal Life and Public Roles
Auden's personal life intersected with politics in unexpected ways. In 1935 he contracted a marriage of convenience with Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas Mann, to help her secure British protection against Nazi persecution; they remained legally married though they lived separate lives. In America he taught at colleges including Swarthmore and lectured widely, a brilliant, digressive presence who could turn a classroom into an arena of ethics and metrics. From 1956 to 1961 he served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, commuting from abroad and demonstrating how cosmopolitan his Englishness had become. Summers on the island of Ischia and later in the Austrian village of Kirchstetten gave him quiet places to write, while winters in New York kept him close to publishers, musicians, and fellow writers.

Works, Style, and Critical Thought
Auden's formal range was extraordinary. He wrote tight lyrics and sprawling sequences, comic song and high elegy, each line informed by a craftsman's ear for stress and cadence. The Shield of Achilles (1955) consolidated his middle-period style and won major American recognition. For the Time Being, a Christmas oratorio, and The Sea and the Mirror, his commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest, explored religious doubt and the burden of artistic self-consciousness. As a critic and essayist he was clear-eyed and humane; The Dyer's Hand (1962) gathered essays and lectures that became a touchstone for poets and teachers. He could turn a cultural diagnosis into a memorable phrase, yet he mistrusted slogans, later disowning a much-quoted line from September 1, 1939 as morally too easy, an emblem of his restless self-revision.

Circles and Influences
Auden's milieu mattered. With Isherwood, Spender, and MacNeice he helped define a 1930s poetry that faced the street and the radio as much as the library. He was edited and advised by T. S. Eliot, engaged in friendly friction with contemporaries across Europe and America, and worked shoulder to shoulder with composers from Britten to Stravinsky. His elegies for Yeats and Freud linked him to the intellectual fathers of an age he both admired and interrogated. Through Kallman he navigated the postwar arts scene, and through correspondences and collaborations he remained a figure in whom different disciplines converged.

Later Years and Death
In later decades Auden cultivated a life of routine and hospitality: a room crowded with books and ashtrays, a schedule that began early, letters written with old-fashioned courtesy and astringent wit. He continued to publish new poems and revise earlier ones, assembling late collections and a commonplace book, A Certain World. He divided his time between New York and Austria, where the modest house at Kirchstetten gave him the quiet of village life. After a reading in Vienna in September 1973, he died suddenly in the city and was buried in Kirchstetten, in the churchyard he had chosen.

Legacy
W. H. Auden left a body of work that maps the twentieth century's anxieties and resources better than almost any peer. He joined public argument to private candor, technical mastery to ethical curiosity. The poet of elegy and epithalamium, of cinema voice-over and opera libretto, of classroom and chapel, he remains a writer at home in many languages of feeling. His poems continue to be read for their intelligence, their music, and their unillusioned charity, and his collaborations with figures such as Christopher Isherwood, Benjamin Britten, and Chester Kallman show how profoundly he believed that art is a social act, a making among others.

Our collection contains 60 quotes who is written by H. Auden, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth.

Other people realated to H. Auden: David Hockney (Artist), Adrienne Rich (Poet), Alan Bennett (Dramatist), C. Day Lewis (Poet), Cyril Connolly (Journalist), George MacDonald (Novelist)