Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
W. H. Auden
-
Standard Name: Auden, W. H.
Used Form: Wystan Hugh Auden
WHA
has been called the outstanding poet of his generation. His prolific output of poetry is endlessly versatile, often deeply personal but usually also carrying political freight, often experimental, combining the classical and the colloquial, the lyric and the deliberately prosaic. He wrote a great deal in collaboration, often for stage or even operatic performance. He was a riveting lecturer and an unsystematic but always stimulating literary critic.
Through the 1930s, Woolf struggled to define herself and her work against the rise of Fascism in Europe, to chart the relationship between artistic and political tasks. She and her Bloomsbury friends began to be...
politics
Sybille Bedford
At this time, with a German passport near its expiry date and an application for French citizenship which had so far gone nowhere, she attracted the attention of the Nazi authorities not only by expressing...
politics
Rosamond Lehmann
RL
, like many of the left-wing intellectuals in the inter-war period, supported the fight against fascism in Spain. Her husband Wogan and many of her male friends, including Auden
, joined the International Brigade
Reception
Marianne Moore
A late flowering of MM
's reputation began when she spoke at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in a double bill with W. H. Auden
.
Williams, Mary-Kay. “What a Mother”. London Review of Books, Vol.
37
, No. 23, p. 19021.
21
Reception
Elizabeth Jennings
EJ
has said that at this date she was beginning to achieve in her work a certain mastery of form
Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books.
100
and the quality she was aiming at, a clarity, a kind of lyrical innocence...
Textual Features
Seamus Heaney
These pieces cover elders and friends (Larkin
, Walcott
, Patrick Kavanagh
), poets of Eastern Europe where poetry performs the service of resistance to political oppression (as it might do in Northern Ireland...
Textual Features
Philip Larkin
As an undergraduate Larkin was naturally still finding his voice. One poem dating from probably 1943 has its title and its lesbian topic from Charles Baudelaire
: Femmes Damnées. Larkin's poem of this title...
This volume's title and epigraph are taken from The Great Gatsby. Like AR
's other works, Dark Fields of the Republic reflects a diverse group of artistic and social influences, which include the Bible...
Textual Production
Jane Gardam
The book is dedicated to Stone. Its epigraph quotes W. H. Auden
: We are not free to choose by what we / shall be enchanted. The poet advises, in the case of a...
Textual Production
Candia McWilliam
CMW
published her second novel, A Little Stranger, dedicated to Clara Henderson
, with stanzas from Auden
's poem Trinculo's Song as an epigraph.
As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan
, her models included the suave, disciplined, informal, very accessible
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
122
early poems of her near-contemporary Adrienne Rich
. She wrote two stage works that were performed...
Textual Production
Hannah Arendt
Authors or politicians whom HA
wrote about in articles, reviews, or editions (excluding those essays reprinted in Men in Dark Times) include Konrad Adenauer
, W. H. Auden
, Wilhelm Dilthey
, Waldemar Gurian
