What major award did W. H. Auden win for The Age of Anxiety?

The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 when it was published separately.

Why did W. H. Auden move to New York City in January 1939?

Auden and Christopher Isherwood sailed to New York City in January 1939 entering on temporary visas after their departure from Britain caused many to view it as betrayal.

Did W. H. Auden ever become Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom?

Newly declassified UK government files revealed that W. H. Auden was considered candidate for Poet Laureate in 1967 but rejected due to American citizenship.

W. H. Auden: the story on HearLore

Q: When and where was W. H. Auden born?

Wystan Hugh Auden was born at 54 Bootham in York, England on the 21st of February 1907.

Q: Where did W. H. Auden spend his summers starting from 1958?

Starting in 1958 W. H. Auden began spending his summers in Kirchstetten Austria where he bought a farmhouse with prize money from the Premio Feltrinelli awarded to him in 1957.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born at 54 Bootham in York, England, on the 21st of February 1907. His father George Augustus Auden worked as a physician while his mother Constance Rosalie Bicknell had trained as a missionary nurse before never serving in that role. The family moved to Homer Road in Solihull near Birmingham in 1908 where his father took up the post of School Medical Officer and later Professor of Public Health. Young Wystan grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household with doctrine resembling Catholicism and traced his love of music and language partly to church services he attended as a child. He believed himself to be of Icelandic descent and developed a lifelong fascination with Old Norse sagas that would appear throughout his work. At eight years old he began attending boarding schools returning home only for holidays. Until age fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer though words already excited him more than living people could do.

Auden came to wide public attention in 1930 when his first book titled simply Poems was accepted by T.S. Eliot for Faber and Faber. Three plays written between 1935 and 1938 in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood built his reputation as a left-wing political writer. During these years much of his work expressed left-wing views even though he remained privately ambivalent about revolutionary politics. In 1936 Auden spent three months in Iceland gathering material for Letters from Iceland which he wrote with Louis MacNeice. The following year he traveled to Spain intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War but instead found himself writing propaganda at the Republican press office where he felt useless and left after one week. His seven-week visit affected him deeply making his social views more complex as political realities proved ambiguous and troubling. He returned to England after visiting the front at Sarineña before spending six months in 1938 visiting China amid the Sino-Japanese War working on Journey to a War with Isherwood.

Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York City in January 1939 entering on temporary visas. Their departure from Britain later appeared to many as betrayal causing Auden's reputation to suffer significantly. Around this time he met Chester Kallman who became his lover for the next two years. They described their relationship as a marriage that began with a cross-country honeymoon journey. In 1940-41 Auden lived in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights shared with Carson McCullers and Benjamin Britten. This residence became known as February House serving as a famous center of artistic life. In April 1940 Auden joined the Episcopal Church returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at fifteen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the sainthood of Charles Williams whom he had met in 1937 and partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr. By 1946 he had become a naturalized citizen of the United States while retaining his British citizenship.

From 1942 through 1947 Auden worked mostly on three long poems in dramatic form each differing from the others in form and content. The first two were For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio and The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest both published together in 1944. These works addressed theological themes as his verse became more open and relaxed around 1942. He increasingly used syllabic verse learned from Marianne Moore during this period. The third poem The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue was published separately in 1947 winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry that year. After completing it he focused again on shorter poems notably A Walk After Dark The Love Feast and The Fall of Rome. Many of these evoked the Italian village where he spent summers between 1948 and 1957 creating a Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work. A new theme emerged regarding the sacred importance of the human body in its ordinary aspect including breathing sleeping and eating.

Starting in 1958 Auden began spending his summers in Kirchstetten Austria where he bought a farmhouse with prize money from the Premio Feltrinelli awarded to him in 1957. He said that he shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first time. His later poetry mostly written in Austria includes his sequence Thanksgiving for a Habitat about his Kirchstetten home. Between 1956 and 1961 Auden served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University requiring only three lectures each year. This light workload allowed him to continue spending winters in New York at 77 St. Mark's Place while summers were spent in Europe. He earned income mostly from readings lecture tours and writing for magazines like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Following some years of lobbying by friend David Luke Christ Church offered him a cottage on its grounds in February 1972. He moved books and possessions from New York to Oxford in September 1972 while continuing summer stays in Austria with Kallman.

Auden published about four hundred poems including seven long poems during his lifetime. His poetry was encyclopaedic in scope ranging from obscure modernism to lucid traditional forms like ballads and limericks. Critical views on his work ranged sharply from dismissive to strongly affirmative throughout his career. Hugh MacDiarmid called him a complete wash-out while Harold Bloom suggested readers close Auden and open Wallace Stevens instead. Joseph Brodsky wrote that Auden had the greatest mind of the twentieth century. By the time of his death in 1973 he attained status as respected elder statesman with a memorial stone placed in Poets' Corner Westminster Abbey in 1974. Public recognition increased sharply after Funeral Blues appeared in Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994 selling more than 275,000 copies. After the 11th of September 2001 attacks his poem the 1st of September 1939 was widely circulated and frequently broadcast. In 2023 newly declassified UK government files revealed he was considered candidate for Poet Laureate in 1967 but rejected due to American citizenship.

W. H. Auden.

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