W. H. Auden: Poems W. H. Auden

Childhood

Auden was born at 54 Bootham, York, England, to George Augustus Auden (1872–1957), a physician, and Constance Rosalie Auden (née Bicknell; 1869–1941), who had trained (but never served) as a missionary nurse.[6] He was the third of three sons; the eldest, George Bernard Auden (1900–1978), became a farmer, while the second, John Bicknell Auden (1903–1991), became a geologist.[7] The Audens were minor gentry with a strong clerical tradition, originally of Rowley Regis, later of Horninglow, Staffordshire.[8]

Auden, whose grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen,[9] grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household that followed a "High" form of Anglicanism, with doctrine and ritual resembling those of Catholicism.[10][5] 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 evident in his work.[12]

His family moved to Homer Road in Solihull, near Birmingham, in 1908,[11] 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.[13] His visits to the Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining 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".[14][15] 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."[16][17]

Education

Auden attended St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later famous in his own right as a novelist.[18] At thirteen he went to Gresham's School in Holt, Norfolk; there, in 1922, when his friend Robert Medley asked him if he wrote poetry, Auden first realised his vocation was to be a poet.[10] 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).[19] In school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922,[20] and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his last year at Gresham's.[21] A review of his performance as Katherina noted that despite a poor wig, he had been able "to infuse considerable dignity into his passionate outbursts".[22]

His first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923.[23] Auden later wrote a chapter on Gresham's for Graham Greene's The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (1934).[24]

In 1925 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology; he switched to English by his second year, and was introduced to Old English poetry through the lectures of J. R. R. Tolkien. Friends he met at Oxford include 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.[10][11]

Auden was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925 by his fellow student A. S. T. Fisher. For the next few years Auden sent poems to Isherwood for comments and criticism; the two maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others. In 1935–39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.[25]

From his Oxford years onward, Auden's 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.[5]

Britain and Europe, 1928–1938

In late 1928 Auden left Britain for nine months, going to Berlin, perhaps partly as an escape from English repressiveness. In Berlin, he first experienced the political and economic unrest that became one of his central subjects.[11] Around the same time, Stephen Spender privately printed a small pamphlet of Auden's Poems in an edition of about 45 copies, distributed among Auden's and Spender's friends and family; this edition is usually referred to as Poems [1928] to avoid confusion with Auden's commercially published 1930 volume.[26][27]

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, and the same firm remained the British publisher of all the books he published thereafter. 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.[10] At the Downs, in June 1933, he experienced what he later described as a "Vision of Agape", while sitting with three fellow teachers at the school, when 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.[28]

During these years Auden's erotic interests focused, as he later said, on an idealised "Alter Ego"[29] rather than on individual persons. His relationships (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 relationships with what he later regarded as the "marriage" (his word) of equals that he began with Chester Kallman in 1939, based on the unique individuality of both partners.[30]

In 1935 Auden married Erika Mann (1905–1969), the lesbian novelist daughter of Thomas Mann when it became apparent that the Nazis were intending to strip her of her German citizenship.[31] Mann had asked Christopher Isherwood if he would marry her so she could become a British citizen. He declined but suggested she approach Auden, who readily agreed to a marriage of convenience.[32] Mann and Auden never lived together, but remained on good terms throughout their lives and were still married when Mann died in 1969. She left him a small bequest in her will.[33][34] In 1936, Auden introduced actress Therese Giehse, Mann's lover, to the writer John Hampson and they too married so that Giehse could leave Germany.[33]

From 1935 until he left Britain early in 1939, Auden worked as freelance reviewer, essayist, and lecturer, first with the GPO 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.[35] 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".[36] In 1936, Auden 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 writing propaganda at the Republican press and propaganda office, where he felt useless and left after a week.[37] He returned to England after a brief visit to the front at Sarineña. 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.[30][10] Again attempting to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 visiting China amid the Sino-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.[10]

Many of Auden's poems during the 1930s and after were inspired by unconsummated love, and in the 1950s he summarised 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."[38] Throughout his life, Auden performed charitable acts, sometimes in public, as in his 1935 marriage of convenience to Erika Mann,[10] but, especially in later years, more often in private. 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.[39]

United States and Europe, 1939–1973

Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York City in January 1939, entering on temporary visas. Their departure from Britain was later seen by many as a betrayal, and Auden's reputation suffered.[10] 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).[40]

In 1941 Kallman ended their sexual relationship because he could not accept Auden's insistence on mutual fidelity,[41] but he and Auden remained companions for the rest of Auden's life, sharing houses and apartments from 1953 until Auden's death.[42] Auden dedicated both editions of his collected poetry (1945/50 and 1966) to Isherwood and Kallman.[43]

In 1940–41 Auden lived in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, that he shared with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others, which became a famous centre of artistic life, nicknamed "February House".[44] In 1940, Auden joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at fifteen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams,[45] whom he had met in 1937, and partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life.[46]

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. He 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 for the draft 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.[10]

In mid-1945, after the end of World War II in Europe, he was in Germany with the US 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.[43] On his return, he settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer, 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 naturalised citizen of the US.[10][11]

In 1948 Auden began spending his summers in Europe, together with Chester Kallman, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house. Starting in 1958 he began spending his summers in Kirchstetten, Austria, where he bought a farmhouse from the prize money of the Premio Feltrinelli awarded to him in 1957.[47] He said that he shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first time.[10] His later poetry, mostly written in Austria, includes his sequence "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" about his Kirchstetten home.[48] Auden's letters and papers sent to his friend the translator Stella Musulin (1915–1996), available online, provide insights into his Austrian years.[49]

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 spend winter in New York, where he lived at 77 St. Mark's Place in Manhattan's East Village, and to spend summer in Europe, spending only three weeks each year lecturing in Oxford. He earned his income mostly from readings and lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines.[11]

In 1963 Kallman left the apartment he shared in New York with Auden, and lived during the winter in Athens while continuing to spend his summers with Auden in Austria. Auden spent the winter of 1964-1965 in Berlin through an artist-in-residence program of the Ford Foundation.[50][51]

Following some years of lobbying by his friend David Luke, Auden's old college, Christ Church, in February 1972 offered him a cottage on its grounds to live in; he moved his books and other possessions from New York to Oxford in September 1972,[52] while continuing to spend summers in Austria with Kallman. He spent only one winter in Oxford before his death in 1973.

Auden died at 66 of heart failure at the Altenburgerhof Hotel in Vienna overnight on 28–29 September 1973, a few hours after giving a reading of his poems for the Austrian Society for Literature at the Palais Pálffy. He was intending to return to Oxford the following day. He was buried on 4 October in Kirchstetten, and in London a memorial stone was placed in Westminster Abbey a year later.[53][54]