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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Her central figure, Alfred White, a park-keeper in a London borough based on that of Brent, is an old-fashioned ex-soldier who combines integrity, compassion, and intense pride in his job, with a violent temper...
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...
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.
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....
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.