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W H Auden [1907-1973] ENG/USA
Ranked #211 in the top 380 poets

Love, political, social, cultural, psychological, religious. Stylistic and technical achievement. Variety in tone, form and content.

Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential, and critical views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907, he moved to Birmingham with his family during his childhood and was later educated at Christ`s Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. In 1928, Auden published his first book of verse, and his collection Poems, published in 1930, which established him as the leading voice of a new generation. Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.

He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.

W. H. Auden was a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.

Auden Group, Christian, Formalism, Homoerotism, Modernism

YearsCountryPoetInteraction
-65--8
ROM
Horace
→ influenced W H Auden
1265-1321
ITA
Dante Alighieri
→ influenced W H Auden
1688-1744
ENG
Alexander Pope
→ influenced W H Auden
1759-1796
SCO
Robert Burns
→ influenced W H Auden
1824-1905
SCO
George MacDonald
→ influenced W H Auden
1840-1928
ENG
Thomas Hardy
→ influenced W H Auden
1875-1926
BOH/DEU
Rainer Maria Rilke
→ influenced W H Auden
1883-1963
USA
William Carlos Williams
→ influenced W H Auden
1887-1972
USA
Marianne Moore
→ (syllabic verse) influenced W H Auden
1888-1965
USA/ENG
Thomas Stearns Eliot
→ influenced W H Auden
1914-1965
USA
Randall Jarrell
→ (later work) disliked W H Auden
1940-1996
RUS/USA
Joseph Brodsky
→ praised W H Auden
1631-1700
ENG
John Dryden
← praised by W H Auden
1809-1892
ENG
Alfred Lord Tennyson
← disliked by W H Auden
1863-1933
GRC
Constantine P Cavafy
← praised by W H Auden
1865-1939
IRL
William Butler Yeats
← (spiritualism) disliked by W H Auden
1897-1970
USA
Louise Bogan
← praised by W H Auden
1906-1984
ENG
John Betjeman
← influenced by W H Auden
1908-1963
USA
Theodore Roethke
← influenced by W H Auden
1913-1980
AFR/USA
Robert Hayden
← influenced by W H Auden
1914-1972
USA
John Berryman
← influenced by W H Auden
1914-1965
USA
Randall Jarrell
← influenced by W H Auden
1917-2003
ENG
Charles Causley
← influenced by W H Auden
1922-1985
ENG
Philip Larkin
← influenced by W H Auden
1924-2000
ISR
Yehuda Amichai
← influenced by W H Auden
1929-2012
USA
Adrienne Rich
← praised by W H Auden
1940-1996
RUS/USA
Joseph Brodsky
← influenced by W H Auden


WorkLangRating
Funeral Blues
eng
131
If I Could Tell You
eng
38
Refugee Blues
eng
20
Lullaby
eng
18
I Have No Gun,But I Can Spit
eng
17
Lady Weeping at the Crossroads
eng
17
River Profile
eng
8
Old People`s Home
eng
7
In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
eng
6
Night Mail
eng
6
O What Is That Sound
eng
6
This Lunar Beauty
eng
6
Are You There?
eng
5
Cocaine Lil and Morphine Sue
eng
5
A New Age
eng
4
As I Walked Out One Evening
eng
4
In Praise Of Limestone
eng
4
Here War Is Simple
eng
3
O Where Are You Going?
eng
3
After Reading A Child`s Guide To Modern Physics
eng
2
For Friends Only
eng
2
Look, Stranger
eng
2
Musee des Beaux Arts
eng
2
The Unknown Citizen
eng
2
Villanelle
eng
2
A New Year Greeting
eng
1
At Last the Secret is Out
eng
1
August 1968
eng
1
Consider This And In Our Time
eng
1
Friday`s Child
eng
1
It`s No Use Raising A Shout
eng
1
Let History Be My Judge
eng
1
Nocturne
eng
1
Roman Wall Blues
eng
1
September 1, 1939
eng
1
The Geography of the House
eng
1
We`re Late
eng
1
A Walk After Dark
eng
0
Academic Graffiti
eng
0
Another Time
eng
0
As the poets have mournfully sung
eng
0
As We Like It
eng
0
At the Party
eng
0
Atlantis
eng
0
Autumn Song
eng
0
Base Words Are Uttered
eng
0
Calypso
eng
0
Canzone
eng
0
Carry Her Over the Water
eng
0
Christmas Oratio
eng
0
Death`s Echo
eng
0
Deftly, Admiral, Cast Your Fly
eng
0
Doggerel by a Senior Citizen
eng
0
Edward Lear
eng
0
Epitaph On A Tyrant
eng
0
Eyes Look Into The Well
eng
0
Fish in the Unruffled Lakes
eng
0
Five Songs - II
eng
0
For What As Easy
eng
0
from In Time of War
eng
0
from The Cave of Making
eng
0
Ganymede
eng
0
Gare du Midi
eng
0
Give me a doctor
eng
0
Horae Canonicae: Compline
eng
0
Horae Canonicae: Lauds
eng
0
Horae Canonicae: Nones
eng
0
Horae Canonicae: Prime
eng
0
Horae Canonicae: Sext
eng
0
Horae Canonicae: Terce
eng
0
Hunting Fathers
eng
0
In Memory of Sigmund Freud
eng
0
In the Time of War, XII
eng
0
Johnny
eng
0
Kairos and Logos
eng
0
Law, Like Love
eng
0
Let A Florid Music Praise
eng
0
Like A Vocation
eng
0
Miranda
eng
0
Miss Gee
eng
0
Moon Landing
eng
0
O Tell Me The Truth About Love
eng
0
On the Circuit
eng
0
Partition
eng
0
Petition
eng
0
Seascape
eng
0
Song
eng
0
Song Of The Master And Boatswain
eng
0
Taller To-day
eng
0
Thanksgiving for a Habitat
eng
0
The Common Life
eng
0
The Dream
eng
0
The Fall of Rome
eng
0
The Hidden Law
eng
0
The Labyrinth
eng
0
The More Loving One
eng
0
The Novelist
eng
0
The Quest
eng
0
The Quest XII (Vocation)
eng
0
The Riddle
eng
0
The Shield Of Achilles
eng
0
The Two
eng
0
The Wanderer
eng
0
The Waters
eng
0
They Wondered Why the Fruit had Been Forbidden
eng
0
Three Short Poems
eng
0
Under Which Lyre
eng
0
Underneath an Abject Willow
eng
0
Victor
eng
0
Voltaire At Ferney
eng
0
Warm are the Still and Lucky Miles
eng
0
We Too Had Known Golden Hours
eng
0
Who`s Who
eng
0

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