Wystan Hugh Auden was born in 1907 in York,
England, the third son of a physician. In 1908 his father became Medical
Officer and Professor of Public Health at the University of Birmingham. Auden attended
private schools and then Oxford, taking his degree in 1928.
During
the Thirties Auden became by common consent the principal poet of his
generation, and other writers such as Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day Lewis, and
Stephen Spender, in spite of their considerable differences from him, were to
be writing under his banner. He supported himself at first by teaching, and
was to do this sporadically for much of his life. But his urge to travel
became conspicuous. In 1937 he and MacNeice published their Letters from
Iceland, after making a trip to that country at their publisher's expense.
The same year Auden went to Spain in support of the Loyalists. A year later he
and Christopher Isherwood went to China, and Auden wrote Journal to a War.
In January 1939 Auden and Isherwood left England with the intension of
residing permanently in the United States. He became an American citizen in
1946. Most of his time in later years was shared equally between two
residences, one in Greenwich Village (New York City) and the other in
Kirchstetten, Lower Austria. But in 1972 he was invited to take up lodgings at
his old college, Christ Church, Oxford, and consented to do so. In Vienna,
where he had been invited to lecture on his poetry, he died suddenly on
September 28, 1973.
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to Poetry.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973, pp. 276-277.
