W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden was the central figure in English-language poetry between the death of Yeats and the rise of the confessional poets — a writer of such prodigious technical facility, intellectual range, and moral seriousness that he dominated mid-century poetry as thoroughly as Eliot had dominated the generation before. He wrote love lyrics, political satire, philosophical meditations, comic light verse, opera libretti, travel writing, and literary criticism with equal assurance, and his ability to move between registers — from the sublime to the conversational, from the public to the intimate — gave his work a human warmth that distinguished it from the mandarin austerity of Eliot and the hermetic difficulty of late Pound.

England and the 1930s

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in 1907 in York, England, into a professional-class family — his father was a distinguished physician, his mother a devout Anglo-Catholic. He was educated at Gresham’s School and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read English and where his precocious talent and commanding personality quickly established him as the leader of a generation of poets that included Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice — the so-called “Auden Group.”

His first collection, Poems (1930), announced a voice unlike anything in contemporary English poetry: allusive, compressed, enigmatic, drawing simultaneously on Old English alliterative verse, post-Freudian psychology, and the landscape of industrial England. The poems depicted a society in crisis — emotionally repressed, politically paralysed, spiritually exhausted — with a diagnostic precision that made Auden seem not merely a poet but a diagnostician of civilisation’s diseases.

Throughout the 1930s, Auden was the unofficial laureate of the English left. His poems addressed the political crises of the decade — the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, the failure of liberal democracy — with an urgency and rhetorical power that no other English poet matched. “Spain” (1937) and “September 1, 1939” were among the most widely quoted political poems of the century, though Auden later repudiated both for what he considered their rhetorical dishonesty.

The Move to America

In January 1939, Auden emigrated to the United States with Christopher Isherwood — a departure that was widely perceived in England as desertion and that damaged his reputation there for decades. In New York, he met Chester Kallman, the young poet who became his lover and lifelong companion, and he experienced a return to the Anglican Christianity of his childhood — a conversion that profoundly altered his poetry.

Another Time (1940), his first American collection, contained some of his most famous poems, including “Musée des Beaux Arts” (“About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters”), “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” and “September 1, 1939.” These poems marked a shift from the public, prophetic voice of the 1930s toward a more personal, meditative mode — still technically brilliant but warmer, more self-questioning, and more willing to acknowledge uncertainty.

The Age of Anxiety and After

The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947) won the Pulitzer Prize and gave a name to the postwar era. The long poem — set in a New York bar during wartime, following four strangers through their alcohol-fuelled conversation — was a meditation on the spiritual condition of modern humanity, written in an Anglo-Saxon alliterative metre that gave its contemporary subject a mythic resonance. Leonard Bernstein composed his Symphony No. 2 in response to the poem.

Nones (1951), The Shield of Achilles (1955, National Book Award), Homage to Clio (1960), and About the House (1965) continued Auden’s exploration of what he called “the just city” — the possibility of a human community founded on justice, love, and mutual recognition. The poems became increasingly conversational, domestic, and funny — Auden writing about his house in Austria, his daily routines, his ageing body, his cat — but their apparent casualness concealed a formal sophistication and moral depth that rewarded close reading.

The Critic

Auden was also one of the finest literary critics of his era. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (1962) collected his critical prose on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to Tolkien, from opera to detective fiction, and its combination of learning, wit, and independence of judgment made it one of the essential works of twentieth-century literary criticism. The Enchafèd Flood (1950) and Secondary Worlds (1968) explored the relationship between literature and belief with characteristic intelligence.

His collaborations with Chester Kallman on opera libretti — including The Rake’s Progress (1951) for Igor Stravinsky, Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The Bassarids (1966) for Hans Werner Henze — constitute a significant body of work in their own right and demonstrate Auden’s mastery of yet another literary form.

How does Auden compare to Eliot?

The comparison is the central debate of twentieth-century English poetry. Eliot was the greater revolutionary — The Waste Land changed what poetry could do in a way that no single Auden poem did. But Auden was the more humane, more various, and ultimately more generous poet. Eliot’s poetry narrows as it matures, moving toward the Four Quartets’ austere spiritual meditation; Auden’s expands, embracing more subjects, more tones, more forms. Eliot asks his readers to ascend; Auden invites them in.

Auden’s later revisions and repudiations of his earlier work — he removed “September 1, 1939” from his collected poems, calling it “trash” — have frustrated readers and critics, but they reflect a genuine and admirable intellectual honesty: a refusal to profit from poems he no longer believed were true.

Collecting Auden

First editions of Auden’s early collections, published by Faber and Faber (UK) and Random House (US), are among the most desirable items in twentieth-century poetry collecting. Poems (Faber, 1930, first trade edition after the Spender hand-printed edition of 1928) is the primary target. The Age of Anxiety (Random House, 1947), The Shield of Achilles (Random House, 1955), and About the House (Random House, 1965) are all collected. The Spender hand-printed Poems (1928), in an edition of approximately thirty copies, is one of the holy grails of modern first editions. Auden’s opera libretti and critical works are also collected.