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W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/lit/POET/whauden.htm

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Auden including a BIOGRAPHY, audio files, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and external links.

http://audensociety.org/

This link connects you to the W. H. Auden Society where you will find several of Auden's poems in addition to useful bibliographic information.

BIOGRAPHY

The British modernist author W. H. Auden was born in York, England. As a student at St. Edmund's preparatory school, he first met Christopher Isherwood with whom he would share a rich literary collaboration. Auden later studied at Christ Church, Oxford and was a leader of a new circle of British poets that included Stephen Spender, C. Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. Auden's early poetry in Poems (1930) and Look Stranger! (1936) was inspired by Freudian psychology, social Marxism, and a commitment to the leftist international community that led him to participate in the Spanish Civil War, where he served the Republican cause as an ambulance driver. In 1939 Auden emigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1946. During the 1940s, Auden turned toward Christianity and became a convert to the Anglican Church. By 1956, Auden assumed the position of professor of poetry at Oxford and led a cosmopolitan life in England, New York, Italy, and Austria where he died in 1973. Throughout his life, Auden authored more than twenty-five volumes of verse. In addition to his career as a poet, Auden composed with his long-time companion Chester Kallman several opera librettos including one for Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951); he also wrote discerning literary criticism collected in The Dyer's Hand (1962).

SECONDARY SOURCES

Bozorth, Richard R. Auden's Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality. New York : Columbia University Press, 2001.

Bryant, Marsha. Auden and Documentary in the 1930s. Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 1997.

Emig, Rainer. W.H. Auden: Towards a Postmodern Poetics. New York : St. Martin's Press: 2000.

Fuller, John. W.H. Auden: A Commentary. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1998.

Hecht, Anthony. The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1993.

Hendon, Paul, Ed. The Poetry of W.H. Auden. Duxford : Icon, 2000.

Jacobs, Alan. What Became of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry. Fayetteville : University of Arkansas Press, 1998.

Mendelson, Edward. Later Auden. New York : Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER