W. H. Auden

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
death W. B. Yeats
He was buried there two days later, having resisted the known wish of the Irish people that he should have a state funeral.
Tóibín, Colm. “A Djinn speaks”. London Review of Books, pp. 19-24.
24
Auden 's poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats, included...
Education Elizabeth Bishop
EB loved the village school in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she learned to read and write. She later, supported by a Bishop family trust, attended first a summer camp, then a private school...
Family and Intimate relationships Hannah Arendt
After less than a month as a widow, HA received a proposal of marriage from W. H. Auden , who was a friend but not a particularly close one. He suggested that they were both...
Friends, Associates Sybille Bedford
Introduced to Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria by the South African poet Roy Campbell while at Sanary, the young SB became their intimate friend.
Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint.
249-50
She was later embarrassed by her earlier admiration for...
Friends, Associates Marianne Moore
MM corresponded with T. S. Eliot from 1921 until the year before his death. She was a friend of H. D. and of Bryher , and her editors believe that every one of her five...
Friends, Associates Rosamond Lehmann
RL was also a great success with the art-historian Bernard Berenson . Among a younger generation of artists and writers whom she often welcomed as guests were Siegfried Sassoon , W. H. Auden , Christopher Isherwood
Friends, Associates Ling Shuhua
Other authors with connections to Bloomsbury were drawn to Wuhan: W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood visited the campus on 22 April 1938 during their longer trip on which they wrote about the Sino-Japanese...
Friends, Associates Carson McCullers
CMC therefore shared her day-to-day life at various times with Davis , W. H. Auden , Louis MacNiece , Gypsy Rose Lee , Benjamin Britten , Richard Wright , Paul and Jane Bowles , Christopher Isherwood
Friends, Associates Edith Sitwell
During her first visit to the USA, ES met Charlie Chaplin , Greta Garbo , and Marianne Moore . A press party at the Gotham Book Mart in New York was attended by ES ...
Friends, Associates Naomi Mitchison
NM 's adult friends included artists and writers such as Gertrude Hermes , Storm Jameson , Goldie Lowes Dickinson , Julian Trevelyan , Gerald Heard , and Rudi Messel . Among the close friends were...
Friends, Associates Susan Hill
While studying at King's CollegeSH , an aspiring writer, wrote to novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson and her writer husband C. P. Snow for advice on the profession. The couple answered her letters and even...
Intertextuality and Influence Naomi Mitchison
This indicates how the second world war turned her thoughts back towards the first. She noted the feeling of being on a small island of sand, cut off from past and future, and how wireless...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Jennings
As a teenager, EJ read T. S. Eliot and (as she put it) wrote long poems of sort of vers libre which I imagined were influenced by Eliot, and which were very personal, in fact...
Intertextuality and Influence Carol Ann Duffy
Duffy answers back not just to male historical figures but (as a reviewer pointed out) to the male poets who have re-imagined such figures, like Auden in The Fall of Icarus. Elsewhere she remarks...
Intertextuality and Influence Liz Lochhead
The Recitations (poems in which the speaking voice is crucial, most of them sharply Scots-vernacular comments on sexual or gender relations) include the title piece, Bagpipe Muzak, Glasgow 1990. This laments (in a nice...

Timeline

By October 1928: Stephen Spender, as an Oxford undergraduate,...

Writing climate item

By October 1928

Stephen Spender , as an Oxford undergraduate, self-published a booklet of poems entitled Nine Experiments.

January 1933: The first number appeared of the periodical...

Writing climate item

January 1933

The first number appeared of the periodicalNew Verse, edited by Geoffrey Grigson ; it ran until May 1939.

February 1936: The awesome trio of political theorist Harold...

Writing climate item

February 1936

The awesome trio
Laity, Paul. “The left’s ace of clubs”. Guardian Unlimited.
of political theorist Harold Laski , publisher Victor Gollancz , and writer and Labour MP John Strachey established the Left Book Club (LBC) .

18 July 1936: The Spanish Civil War began between the Republicans...

National or international item

18 July 1936

The Spanish Civil War began between the Republicans (including Communists) and the Fascists led by Francisco Franco .

Later 1936: The General Post Office Film Unit under John...

Building item

Later 1936

The General Post Office Film Unit under John Grierson created a documentary entitled Night Mail, directed by Basil Wright , which featured music by Benjamin Britten and a film poem by W. H. Auden .

15 August 1947: British rule on the Indian subcontinent ended...

National or international item

15 August 1947

British rule on the Indian subcontinent ended in independence for India and Pakistan (which became Dominions within the Commonwealth), but also in Partition, which divided the new countries along religious lines.

September 1949: PEN International held a conference in Venice....

Writing climate item

September 1949

PEN International held a conference in Venice. Delegates included W. H. Auden , C. P. Snow , Pamela Hansford Johnson , and Cecily Mackworth .

By July 1964: Canadian writer Jane Rule issued in Canada...

Writing climate item

By July 1964

Canadian writer Jane Rule issued in Canada and England her best-known novel, Desert of the Heart, whose title alludes to W. H. Auden 's poem on the death of Yeats .

1979: Anna Adams published her verse letter A Reply...

Women writers item

1979

Anna Adams published her verseletterA Reply to Intercepted Mail (A Verse-Letter to W. H. Auden ) in the Peterloo Poets series.

Texts

Rich, Adrienne, and W. H. Auden. A Change of World. Yale University Press, 1951.
Auden, W. H. About the House. Random House, 1965.
Auden, W. H. Another Time. Faber and Faber, 1940.
Auden, W. H. Collected Longer Poems. Random House, 1965.
Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Editor Mendelson, Edward, Faber and Faber, 1976.
Auden, W. H. Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957. Faber and Faber, 1969.
Auden, W. H. For the Time Being. Random House.
Auden, W. H., and Christopher Isherwood. Journey to a War. Faber and Faber, 1939.
Auden, W. H., and Louis MacNeice. Letters from Iceland. Faber and Faber, 1937.
Auden, W. H. Look, Stranger!. Faber and Faber, 1936.
Britten, Benjamin, and W. H. Auden. Paul Bunyan. Faber Music.
Auden, W. H. Poems. Faber and Faber, 1930.
Auden, W. H. Secondary Worlds. Faber and Faber, 1968.
Auden, W. H. “September 1, 1939”. Poets.org: from the Academy of American Poets: Auden.
Auden, W. H. Thank You, Fog. Faber and Faber, 1974.
Auden, W. H. The Age of Anxiety. Random House, 1947.
Auden, W. H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. Random House, 1962.
Auden, W. H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. Faber and Faber, 1975.
Auden, W. H. The Enchafèd Flood; or, the Romantic Iconography of the Sea. Faber and Faber, 1950.
Stravinsky, Igor Fedorovich et al. The Rake’s Progress. Sorteni.
Auden, W. H. The Shield of Achilles. Faber and Faber, 1955.