- guardian.co.uk,
- Tuesday July 22 2008 15:41 BST
1907-1973
"'Why do you want to write poetry?' If the young man answers, 'I have important things I want to say,' then he is not a poet. If he answers, 'I like hanging around words listening to what they say,' then maybe he is going to be a poet."
Birthplace
York, England
Education
Christ Church College, Oxford
Other jobs
Schoolteacher
Did you know?
In 1935 he married Thomas Mann's daughter to provide her with a British passport in order to escape Nazi Germany.
Critical verdict
Stop all the clocks... Four Weddings and a Funeral's use of 'Funeral Blues' put Tell Me The Truth About Love, a slim slice of Auden in romantic mode, on the bestseller table next to The Little Book of Feline Feng Shui. In fact, Auden's poetic influence has been enormous: prolific, stylistically varied, politically engaged and accessible, he was the pre-eminent leftist voice of his generation while young; his later work moved towards religion and deepened in complexity.
Recommended works
Collected poems (or the single volume The Shield of Achilles)
Influences
Auden achieved critical kudos while still at university; his first book was accepted by Faber's TS Eliot. In his early writing he was much influenced by Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry, while his plays have a Brechtian flavour.
Now read on
Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, WB Yeats. Auden's circle included Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender: see Letters From Iceland, written with MacNeice.
Adaptations
Britten set many poems to music; his Paul Bunyan uses Auden's words. (Although Auden said, "No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.")
Recommended biography
Richard Davenport-Hines's Auden is concise and readable.
Criticism
The Auden Generation by S Hynes; see Auden's own critical prose, especially The Dyer's Hand.
