A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.Īuden visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil War, and, in 1939, moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. In 1928, Auden’s collection, Poems, was privately printed, but it wasn’t until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.Įver since, Auden has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. At Oxford, his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England on February 21, 1907.

Wh auden selected poems