Wystan Hugh Auden (February 21, 1907 - September 29, 1973) was an English-American poet. Auden's poetry is noted for its style and technical accomplishments, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and the diversity of its tone, form and content. He is famous for his love poems such as "Funeral Blues", poems on political and social themes such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles", poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as "For Now" and "Horae Canonicae."
He was born in York, growing up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle class family. He attended independent (or public) English schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. After several months in Berlin in 1928-1929 he spent five years (1930-35) teaching in British public schools, then going to Iceland and China to write books on his journey.
In 1939 he moved to the United States and became an American citizen in 1946. He taught from 1941 to 1945 in American universities, followed by professor visits in the 1950s. From 1947 to 1957, he wintered in New York and entered Ischia; from 1958 to the end of his life, he wintered in New York (at Oxford in 1972-73) and summarized in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria.
He came to public attention at the age of twenty-three, in 1930, with his first book, Poems, followed in 1932 by The Orators. Three dramas written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935-1938 established his reputation as a left-wing political writer. Auden moved to the United States partly to escape this reputation, and his work in the 1940s, including long poems "For the Current Being" and "Sea and Mirror," focused on religious themes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1947 long poem The Age of Anxiety, a title that became a popular phrase depicting the modern era. In 1956-61 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford; his lectures were popular among students and faculty and became the basis of his 1962 prose collection. Dyer's Hand.
From about 1927 to 1939, Auden and Isherwood maintained lasting but lasting sexual friendships while both had shorter but more intense relationships with other men.
In 1939, Auden fell in love with Chester Kallman and regarded their relationship as marriage; this ended in 1941 when Kallman refused to accept the loyal relationship demanded by Auden, but both retained their friendship, and from 1947 until Auden's death they lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relationship, often collaborating in opera libretti such as The Rake's Progress , for music by Igor Stravinsky.
Auden is a prolific prose writer and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he works at various times in documentaries, poetic dramas, and other forms of performances. Throughout his career, he was highly controversial and influential, and his critical views on his work ranged from greatly underestimated, treating him to WB Yeats and lower TS Eliot, to the very strict, as in Joseph Brodsky's claim that he had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century ". After his death, his poetry was known to the public far more extensively than during his lifetime through movies, broadcasts, and popular media.
Video W. H. Auden
Life
Little
Auden was born in York, England, to George Augustus Auden (1872-1957), a doctor, and Constance Rosalie Auden (nÃÆ' Â © e Bicknell; 1869-1941), who has trained (but never served) as a missionary nurse. He is the third of three sons; the oldest, George Bernard Auden (1900-1978), became a farmer, while the second, John Bicknell Auden (1903-1991), became a geologist.
Auden, whose grandfather was a pastor of the Church of England, grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household following the form of "Higher Anglicism" with doctrines and rituals that resembled Roman Catholicism. He traces his love of music and language in part to the ministry of the church in his childhood. He believes he is of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong appeal to the Icelandic legend and the Old Norse story is evident in his work.
In 1908 his family moved to Homer Street, Solihull, near Birmingham, where his father had been appointed as a School Medical Officer and Lecturer (then Professor) of Public Health. Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interest begins at his father's library. From the age of eight he attended the boarding school, returning home for a holiday. His visit to the Pennine landscape and the tin mining industry figure declined in many of his poems; Rookhope's remote mining village for him is the "sacred landscape", which is raised in the last poem, "Amor Loci". Until he was fifteen, he was expected to become a mining engineer, but his desire for words had already begun. He wrote later: "words so excite me that the story of pornography, for example, makes me more sexually passionate than a living person can do it."
Education
Auden attended St. Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later renowned as a novelist. At age thirteen he went to Gresham School in Norfolk; there, in 1922, when his friend Robert Medley asked if he wrote a poem, Auden first realized that his call was to become a poet. Soon afterwards, he "discovered (ed) that he had lost his faith" (through a gradual consciousness that he had lost interest in religion, not through a change of view that was decisive). In Shakespeare's school production, he played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922, and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his final year at Gresham. His first published poem appeared in a school magazine in 1923. Auden later wrote a chapter on Gresham for Graham Greene The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (1934).
In 1925 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology; he switched to English in the second year. The friends he met at Oxford included Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender; These four men were generally misled in the 1930s as "Auden Group" because of their left-wing views (but not identical). Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a third-grade degree.
Auden was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925 by his fellow student A. S. T. Fisher. Over the next few years, Auden sent a poem to Isherwood for comments and criticisms; both maintain sexual companionship in the interval between their relationships with others. In 1935-1939 they collaborated on three dramas and travel books.
From the years of Oxford and beyond, Auden's friends uniformly described him as funny, wasteful, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. In the group he is often dogmatic and arrogant in a comic way; in a more personal setting, he was shy and embarrassed except when he received a welcome. He was on time in his habit, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while choosing to live in the midst of a physical disorder. British and European, 1928-38
English and European,
In late 1928, Auden left England for nine months, going to Berlin, partly to revolt against British oppression. In Berlin, he first experienced political and economic unrest that became one of his main subjects.
Upon his return to England in 1929, he worked briefly as a teacher. In 1930, his first published book, Poem (1930), was received by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber, and the same company remained British publisher of all the books he published afterwards. In 1930 he began five years as a principal at the boys' school: two years at Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, Scotland, then three years at the Downs School in the Malvern Hills, where he was a much-loved teacher. In Downs, in June 1933, he experienced what he later described as "Agape's Vision", sitting down with three fellow teachers at school, when he suddenly discovered that he loved them, that their existence was of infinite value. for him; This experience, he said, then influenced his decision to return to the Anglican Church in 1940.
During these years, Auden's erotic interests were focused, as he later said, on an idealized "Alter Ego" rather than an individual. The relationship (and its failed grip) tends to be unequal either in age or intelligence; His intercourse was temporary, though some evolved into long friendships. He compares this relationship to what he later considers to be "marriage" (his words) similar to that he started with Chester Kallman in 1939, based on the unique individuality of both partners.
From 1935 until he left the UK in early 1939, Auden worked as a freelance reviewer, essay, and lecturer, first with the Film GPO Unit, a branch of documentary filmmaking from the post office, led by John Grierson. Through his work for the Film Unit in 1935, he met and collaborated with Benjamin Britten, who also worked in drama, song cycles, and libretto. Auden's works of the 1930s were staged by Group Theater, in production he watched to various degrees.
His work now reflects his belief that every good artist should be "more than a handful of reporters". In 1936, Auden spent three months in Iceland where he collected material for a travel book Letter from Iceland (1937), written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice. In 1937 he went to Spain for the purpose of riding an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but was hired to spread propaganda, the work he left to visit the front. The seven-week visit to Spain affected him immensely, and his social views became more complex when he found the political reality more ambiguous and disturbing than he had imagined. Again trying to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 visiting China in the wars of the Chinese-Japanese 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 late 1938 partly in England, partly in Brussels.
Many of Auden's poems during the 1930s and after being inspired by uncreated love, and in the 1950s he summarized his emotional life in the famous temple: "If the same love can not/Let the more loving is me" ("The Loving One "). He had a knack for friendship and, beginning in the late 1930s, a strong desire for marital stability; in a letter to his friend, James Stern, he called marriage a "subject only." Throughout his life, Auden did charity, sometimes in public (as in 1935 his marriage to Erika Mann gave him a British passport to escape from the Nazis), but, especially in later years, more often in private. She was embarrassed if they were expressed openly, as when her present to her friend Dorothy Day for the Catholic Workers movement was reported on the front page of The New York Times in 1956.
United States and Europe, 1939-73
Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York City in January 1939, signed on with a temporary visa. Their departure from England was then seen by many as a betrayal, and Auden's reputation suffered. In April 1939, Isherwood moved to California, and he and Auden met each other only intermittently in subsequent years. Around this time, Auden met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next two years (Auden describes their relationship as a "marriage" beginning with a cross-country "honeymoon" trip).
In 1941 Kallman ended their sexual relationship because he could not accept Auden's insistence on reciprocal allegiance, but he and Auden remained Auden's lifelong friends, sharing homes and apartments from 1953 until Auden's death. Auden dedicated both poetry editions he collected (1945/50 and 1966) to Isherwood and Kallman.
In 1940-1941, Auden lived in a house on 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, which he shared with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others, who became the center of famous artistic life, dubbed "The House of February". In 1940, Auden joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he left behind at the age of fifteen. His reconciliation was influenced in part by what he called the "holiness" of Charles Williams, whom he met in 1937, and partly by reading SÃÆ'¸ren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; Truth, this earthly Christianity became the central element in his life.
After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Auden told the British embassy in Washington that he would return to England if necessary. He was told that, among them his age (32), only qualified personnel are required. In 1941-42 he taught English at the University of Michigan. He was summoned for a draft in the United States Army in August 1942, but was rejected for medical reasons. He had been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for 1942-43 but did not use it, instead choosing to teach at Swarthmore College in 1942-1945.
In mid-1945, following the end of World War II in Europe, he was in Germany with the US Strategic Bombing Survey, studying the effects of the Allied bombing on German morals, an experience that affected his postwar work during his visit to Spain had affected him before. Upon his return, he settled in Manhattan, worked as a freelance writer, a lecturer at New School for Social Research, and a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American colleges. In 1946 he became a naturalized United States citizen.
In 1948, Auden began spending his summer in Europe, along with Chester Kallman, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house. Then, beginning in 1958, he began spending his summer in Kirchstetten, Austria, where he bought a farmhouse from the prize money of Premio Feltrinelli given to him in 1957. He said that he shed tears the happiness to own a home for the first time. In 1956-61, Auden was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford where he was asked to give three lectures each year. This light enough workload allowed him to continue spending the winter in New York, where he lived at 77 St. Mark's Place in East Village Manhattan, and spent the summer in Europe, spending only three weeks each year teaching at Oxford. She earned most of her reading and lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker, The New York Review Book, and other magazines.
In 1963 Kallman left the apartment he lived in New York with Auden, and lived during the winter in Athens while continuing to spend his summer with Auden in Austria. In 1972, Auden moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his college Christ Church offered him a cabin, while he continued to spend the summer in Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973, several hours after giving his poetry readings in the Austrian Society for Literature; his death occurred at the Altenburgerhof Hotel where he stayed overnight before he returned to Oxford the next day. He was buried in Kirchstetten.
Maps W. H. Auden
Work
Auden publishes about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them long books). His poetry is encyclopaedic in scope and method, ranging from styles from obscure 20th century modernism to clear traditional forms such as ballads and limiter, from doggers through haiku and villanelles to "Christmas Oratorio" and the baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters.. His tone and poetry contents range from pop clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from corn on his fingers to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.
He has also written over four hundred essays and reviews on literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated in playing with Christopher Isherwood and in opera libretti with Chester Kallman, and worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the early music group New York Pro Musica in the 1950s and 1960s. About the collaboration he wrote in 1964: "the collaboration has brought me greater erotic pleasure than the sexual relationships I have."
Auden controversially rewrote or discard some of his most famous poems when he prepared the editions he later collected. He writes that he rejects poetry that he finds "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they express views he has never held but have used simply because he feels they will be rhetorically effective. The rejected poems included "Spain" and "September 1, 1939". His literary actor, Edward Mendelson, argues in the introduction to Selected Poems that Auden's practice reflects the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to abuse it. ( Selected Poem includes some of the poems that Auden rejected and the early poetry texts he revised.)
Earning_works, 1922-39 Up to 1930
Auden began writing poetry in 1922, at the age of fifteen, mostly in the style of a 19th-century romantic poet, especially Wordsworth, and then a poet with rural interest, notably Thomas Hardy. At the age of eighteen he found T.Ã, Eliot and adopted an extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his own voice at the age of twenty when he wrote the first poem then included in the work he collected, "From the first down". These and other poems of the late 1920s tend to be in a clipped, elusive style touched upon, but not directly stated, their themes of loneliness and loss. These twenty poems appeared in his first book Poetry (1928), a pamphlet hand-written by Stephen Spender.
In 1928 he wrote his first dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides , subtitle "A Charade", which combined the style and content of the Icelandic story with a joke of English school life. This mixture of tragedies and jokes, with play-in-a-play, introduces mixed styles and content from most of the work in the future. This drama and thirty short poems appeared in his first book published Poems (1930, second edition with seven replaced poems, 1933); the poems in the book are mostly lyrical and gnome mediations of expected or unpopular love and of personal, social, and seasonal themes of renewal; among these poems is "It was Easter as I walked," "Doomsday dark," "Master, not a male enemy," and "The beauty of this month."
The recurrent theme in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts", the term Auden for the powerful and invisible psychological influence of previous generations on the life of any individual (and the title of the poem). The parallel theme, present throughout his work, is the contrast between biological evolution (untouchable and unintentional) and the psychological evolution of culture and individuals (voluntary and even deliberate in the unconscious aspect).
1931-35
The next major work of Auden is The Orators: An English Study (1932, revised edition, 1934, 1966), in verse and prose, especially about the hero's worship in personal and political life. In his shorter poems, his style becomes more open and accessible, and the extraordinary "Six Odes" in The Orators reflects his new interest in Robert Burns. Over the next few years, many of his poetry took their form and style from traditional ballads and popular songs, as well as from the classic expansive forms such as Horace's Odes , which he seems to find through the German language poet HÃÆ'¶lderlin. Around this time the main influence is Dante, William Langland, and Alexander Pope.
During these years, most of his works expressed his left-wing views, and he became widely known as a political poet although he was personally more ambivalent about revolutionary politics than many recognized reviewers, and Mendelson argued that he outlined some political views of meaning. moral obligations and partly because it enhances his reputation, and that he later regrets having done so. He generally writes about revolutionary change in terms of "change of heart", the transformation of society from the psychology of closed fear into the psychology of open love.
The drama of The Dance of Death (1933) is a political extravaganza in the theater style, which is later called Auden "nihilistic leg pull." The next game The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), written in collaboration with Isherwood, is also a semi-marxist update about Gilbert and Sullivan, where the general idea of ​​social transformation is more prominent than the specific one. action or political structure.
The Ascent of F6 (1937), another drama written with Isherwood, is partly an anti-imperialist satyr, partly (in self-destructive climbing character Michael Ransom), Auden's own motive inspection in the role public as a political poet. This game includes the first version of "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all hours"), written as a satirical speech for a politician; Auden later rewrote the poem as "Cabaret's Song" of lost love (written for soprano Hedli Anderson, for whom he wrote many lyrics in the 1930s). In 1935, he worked briefly in a documentary with the Film GPO Unit, wrote his famous paragraph commentary for Night Mail and lyrics for other films that were among his efforts in the 1930s to make it widely accessible, social. art conscious.
1936-39
In 1936, Auden publishers chose the title View, Strangers! for political collections, love poems, comic songs, meditative lyrics, and various intellectually intense but emotionally accessible verses; Auden hates title and entitles collection to US edition 1937 On This Island ). Among the poems included in the book are "Hear the harvest", "Get out on the grass I lie in bed", "O what is that noise", "Look, strangers, on this island now" (revised version later changed "on" to "at"), and "Our hunting father".
Auden now argues that an artist must be a kind of journalist, and he practices this view in Icelandic Letters (1937) a travel book in prose and verse written with Louis MacNeice, which includes his book. length of social commentary, literature, and autobiography "Letter to Lord Byron". In 1937, after observing the Spanish Civil War he wrote politically involved poetry pamphlets Spanish (1937); he then threw it away from the works he collected. Journey to a War (1939) a travel book in the form of prose and poetry, written with Isherwood after their visit to the China-Japan War. Auden's final collaboration with Isherwood is their third game, On the Frontier , an anti-war satire written in Broadway and West End styles.
Shorter Auden poems are now involved with the fragility and privacy of personal love ("Danse Macabre", "The Dream", "Lay your sleeping head"), a subject he treated with an ironic intelligence in "The Four Song Cabarets for Miss Hedli Anderson" which includes "Tell me the Truth About Love" and the revised version of "Funeral Blues"), as well as the damaging effects of public and official culture on individual lives ("Casino", "School Boy", "Dover"). In 1938 he wrote a series of dark and ironic ballads about individual failures ("Miss Gee", "James Honeyman", "Victor"). All this appears in Another Time (1940), along with poems including "Dover", "As He Is", and "MusÃÆ'Â e des Beaux Arts" (all written before he moved to America in 1939), and "In WB Yeats Memory", "Unknown Citizen", "Law Like Love", "September 1, 1939", and "In Sigmund Freud's Memory" (all written in America).
The elegance for Yeats and Freud is partly an anti-heroic statement, where great deeds are done, not by the unique genius that other people can not hope to imitate, but with ordinary individuals who are "silly like us" (Yeats) he is not smart at all "(Freud), and who became the teacher of others, not an amazing hero.
Middle Period, 1940-57
1940-> 1940-46
In 1940, Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year's Letter", which appeared with various other notes and poems in The Double Man (1941). By the time he returned to the Anglican Communion he began to write abstract verses about theological themes, such as "Canzone" and "Kairos and Logos". Around 1942, when he became more comfortable with religious themes, his poems became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly used the syllables he learned from the poetry of Marianne Moore.
Auden's work in this era discusses the temptation of artists to use others as material for art rather than judging themselves ("Prospero to Ariel") and the corresponding moral obligation to make and keep commitments while acknowledging the temptation to destroy them ("In Disease and Health" ). From 1942 to 1947 he worked mostly on three long poems in dramatic form, each one different from the others in form and content: "For the Current Being: A Christmas Oratorio", "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's < i> The Tempest "(both published in For the Time Being , 1944), and The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (published separately in 1947). The first two, with other new Auden poems from 1940 to 1944, were incorporated into the first edition collected, Poems Collected from W. H H. Auden (1945), with most of the poems -the previous quiz, much in the revised version.
1947-57
After completing the The Age of Anxiety in 1946, he focused again on short poems, especially "A Walk After Dark", "The Love Feast", and "The Fall of Rome". Many of these raised the Italian village where he spent his summer between 1948-57, and the next book,
The first separate Auden prose book is EnchafÃÆ'¨d Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1950), based on a series of lectures on ocean imagery in romantic literature. Between 1949 and 1954 he worked on the seven sequences of Good Friday, titled "Horae Canonicae", an encyclopedic survey of geological, biological, cultural and personal history, focusing on irreversible murder; The poem is also a study of the idea of ​​cycle and linear time. While writing this, he also wrote "Bucolics," a sequence of seven poems about human relationships with nature. The two sequences appear in the next book, The Shield of Achilles (1955), with other short poems, including the title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier".
In 1955-56, Auden wrote a group of poems about "history", a term he uses to interpret a series of unique events made by human choice, as opposed to "nature", a series of unintentional events created by natural processes, statistics, and strength anonymous like the crowds. These poems include "T the Great", "The Maker", and the title of the poem from the next collection of Homage to Clio (1960).
Later work, 1958-73
In the late 1950s Auden's style became less rhetorical while various styles increased. In 1958, after moving his summer home from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Goodbye to Mezzogiorno"; Other poems from this period include "Dichtung und Wahrheit: Unpublished Poetry", a prose poem about the relationship between love and private and poetic language, and contrasting "Dame Kind", about an anonymous instinctual instinct. These and other poems, including the 1955-66 poem on history, appear in Homage to Clio (1960). His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) compiled many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956-61, along with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s.
Among the new styles and forms in Auden's later work are the haiku and tanka that he began to write after translating the haiku and other verses in the Dag HammarskjÃÆ'¶ld Signs . The sequence of fifteen poems about his home in Austria, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" (written in various styles including an imitation of William Carlos Williams) appeared in About the House (1965), along with other poems that included his reflection on his lecture tour, "On Circuit". In the late 1960s he wrote some of his most powerful poems, including "River Profile" and two poems that looked back on his life, "Prologue in Sixty" and "Forty Years On". All of this appears in City Without Walls (1969). His lifelong passion for the Icelandic legend culminated in the translation of his verse The Elder Edda (1969). Among his themes was then "Christianity without religion" which he learned partially from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his poetry dedication "Child of Friday."
Certain World: An Ordinary Book (1970) is a kind of self-portrait consisting of favorite quotes with comments, arranged in alphabetical order by subject. His final prose book was a selection of essays and reviews, Preface and Closing (1973). The last books of the verse, Epistle to a Godson (1972) and Unfinished Thank You, Mist (published posthumously, 1974) include a reflective poem on languages ​​("Linguistics ("No, Plato, No", "Unpredictable, But Permission"), and his own aging ("New Year Speech", "Speaking to Myself", "A Lullaby" [ "The work din is subdued"]). His last poem was "Archeology", about rituals and irregularities, two recurring themes in his final years.
Reputation and influence
Auden's stature in modern literature has been contested. Perhaps the most common critical view of the 1930s onwards puts it as the last and least of three 20th century English and Irish poets, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, while minority views, more prominent in recent years, put him as the highest of the three. Opinions have ranged from Hugh MacDiarmid, who called him "complete wash," FR Leavis wrote that Auden's ironic style is "self-defense, indulgence or just irresponsibility," and Harold Bloom wrote "Close yourself" Auden, Wallace] your Stevens, "to the obituarist at The Times, who writes:" WHH Auden, for a long time enfant horrible English poem... appeared as a lord undeniable. "
Critical estimates are shared from the beginning. Reviewing the first book of Auden, Poetry (1930), Naomi Mitchison writes "If this is really just the beginning, we may have a master to look forward to." But John Sparrow, recalling Mitchison's comment in 1934, rejected Auden's early work as "a monument for misguided purposes prevailing among contemporary poets, and the fact that... he is being hailed as a 'master' showing how critics help poetry in way down. "Joseph Brodsky claims that he has" the greatest mind of the 20th century ".
The cutest, satirical, and ironic Auden style of the 1930s was widely imitated by young poets like Charles Madge, who wrote in poetry "there waiting for me on a hot summer/auden morning, I read, shuddered and knew. " He is widely depicted as the leader of the "Auden group" consisting of his friends Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. The four were mocked by poet Roy Campbell as if they were an indistinguishable poet named "Macspaunday." Auden's poetic propagandist drama, including The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Climbing F6, and his political poetry such as "Spain" gave him a reputation as a political poet who wrote in progressive voices and accessible, in contrast to Eliot; but this political stance provokes contradictory opinions, such as the opinions of Austin Clarke who call Auden's work "liberal, democratic, and humane", and John Drummond, who writes that Auden abuses "popularizing and popularizing tricks, public imagery" as if the left-wing views were in fact "confined to bourgeois experience."
Auden's departure for America in 1939 was debated in England (even in Parliament), with some people seeing emigration as a betrayal. Auden defenders such as Geoffrey Grigson, in the introduction to the anthology of modern poetry in 1949, wrote that Auden "bends above all". His stature was suggested by books such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes (1977).
In the US, beginning in the late 1930s, the separate and independent tones of the Audan rhythm became influential; John Ashbery recalls that in the 1940s, Auden "was a modern poet". Auden's formal influence is so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Beat Generation is partly a reaction to its influence. From the 1940s to the 1960s, many critics lamented that Auden's work had declined from previous appointments; Randall Jarrell wrote a series of essays to make a case for Auden's later work, and Philip Larkin's "What's Become of Wystan." (1960) had a broad impact.
After his death, some of his poems, especially the "Funeral Blues", "Musée des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939", are known to the wider public. than during his lifetime through popular movies, broadcasts and media.
Auden's first full-length study was Richard Hoggart's Auden: An Introductory Essay (1951), which concluded that "Auden's work, then, is the power of civilization." This was followed by Joseph Warren Beach's The Making of the Auden Canon (1957), the Auden revision rejection account of his previous work. The first systematic critical account is Monroe K. Spears 'Poem Auden: The Disenchanted Island (1963), "written from the belief that Auden's poetry can offer readers' entertainment, instruction, intellectual excitement and aesthetic pleasures incredible, all in abundance abundantly unique in our day. "
Auden was one of three candidates recommended by the Nobel Committee for the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963 and 1965 and six recommended for the 1964 prize. By the time of his death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman, his memorial was placed at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1974. EncyclopÃÆ'Â|dia Britannica wrote that "at the time of Eliot's death in 1965... a convincing case could be made for the assertion that Auden was a substitute of Eliot, since Eliot inherited the one- the only claim of supremacy when Yeats died in 1939. "With few exceptions, British critics tend to treat their work initially as the best, while American critics tend to support middle and later work.
Another group of critics and poets have argued that unlike other modern poets, Auden's reputation has not declined after his death, and his later influence has been very strong on young American poets including John Ashbery, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht and Maxine Kumin.. The typical evaluation then describes him as "the greatest poet of this century" (Peter Parker and Frank Kermode), who "now clearly appears to be the greatest poet in English since Tennyson" (Philip Hensher).
Public acknowledgment of Auden's work increased sharply after its "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all hours") read out in the Four Weddings and a Funeral film (1994); Furthermore, the pamphlet edition of his ten poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love , sold over 275,000 copies. After September 11, 2001, his 1939 poem "September 1, 1939" is widespread and widely aired. Public reading and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in 2007 marked the year of the year.
Overall, Auden's poetry is noted for its style and technical accomplishments, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and the diversity of its tone, form and content.
Warning stones and plaques to commemorate Auden include at Westminster Abbey; at his birthplace in 55 Bootham, York; near his home on Lordswood Road, Birmingham; in the chapel of Christ Church, Oxford; on his apartment site at 1 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn Heights; in his apartment at 77 St Marks Place, New York (damaged and now removed) and at the site of his death at Walfischgasse 5 in Vienna; at his home in Kirchstetten, his studies are open to the public upon request.
Works published
The following list includes only the books of poetry and essays that Auden prepared during his lifetime; for a more complete list, including other works and posthumous editions, see W. H. Auden bibliography.
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