W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–1973)

Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February 21, 1907, in York, England, the youngest of three sons of George Augustus Auden, a physician and later professor of public health in Birmingham, and Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden, a former nurse. The household was High Church Anglican, and his mother in particular gave the faith its texture: incense, vestments, the rhythm of the Prayer Book, a sacramental sense of the world that he absorbed before he could have named it. His father's interests ran to Norse sagas and psychology, and the boy's imagination was formed between the two, the liturgical and the analytic. He was educated at St Edmund's School in Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, and at Gresham's School in Norfolk, then went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1925. He read natural sciences, switched to English, and took a third-class degree in 1928. At about fifteen he had lost his faith, not through crisis, as he later told it, but through a drift of boredom. What replaced it for the next two decades was a restless allegiance to Freud, to Marx, and to the conviction that the right politics or the right psychology might heal a sick society.

Those years took him to Berlin in 1928 and 1929, to schoolmastering in Scotland and England, and to the political left of the 1930s. He went to Spain in early 1937 during the civil war, intending to drive an ambulance, and came away disturbed by what he saw of the Republic's treatment of the church, burned and shuttered churches and priests in hiding. In January 1939 he and Isherwood sailed for the United States, a departure that drew public reproach in wartime Britain and that he was long sensitive about. He settled in New York, and in 1946 became an American citizen.

The turn back to Christianity came gradually and then sharply. In 1940 he began attending Anglican services in New York, partly out of curiosity. He later pointed to a night in 1939, watching a German film about the invasion of Poland in a cinema in Yorkville, when the audience shouted for the Poles to be slaughtered; he recalled thinking that the liberal humanism he held could give no reason why they should not. Reading Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Williams, and Paul Tillich, he came to see the human condition as one of sin and radical dependence, and he rejoined the Church in 1940. He remained a communicant Episcopalian, worshiping in New York and, later, in Austria and Oxford. He never sought ordination and held no office, and his relation to ecclesiastical authority was that of a quiet, observant layman who preferred the old liturgy and distrusted modernizing revisions of the Prayer Book.

His private life was not tidy. He was homosexual, and the church's teaching on the matter stood against how he lived; he did not resolve the tension in public, and he did not pretend there was none. In 1935 he married Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas Mann, to give her a British passport out of Nazi Germany, a marriage of rescue that was never a domestic one. In 1939 he met Chester Kallman, an American poet, and a bond formed that Auden regarded as a marriage in everything but name. Kallman's infidelities ended the erotic partnership within a few years, but Auden remained devoted to him, and their shared work on opera libretti, including The Rake's Progress for Stravinsky, lasted for decades. His mother died in 1941, and the loss shaped him profoundly.

From 1948 he spent summers in Ischia and, from 1958, in Kirchstetten, near Vienna, where he bought a house. He taught at several American colleges, held the Oxford Professorship of Poetry from 1956 to 1961, and in 1972 returned to a cottage at Christ Church. He died of heart failure in Vienna on September 29, 1973, after giving a reading, and was buried in Kirchstetten.

His Writing and Its Influence

Auden began writing poetry at fifteen, after a friend asked whether he wrote and he realized he might. Early influences were Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, and Anglo-Saxon verse, which he loved from his father's Norse enthusiasms, and then T. S. Eliot, whose example he absorbed and soon resisted. His first collection, Poems, appeared in 1930 through Eliot at Faber and Faber, and by the middle of the decade he was the voice of a generation: clipped, diagnostic, alive to landscapes of industrial decay and political dread. He wrote plays with Isherwood, travel books on Iceland and China, and the Spanish poem that carried the line "history to the defeated / may say Alas but cannot help nor pardon." He later disowned much of this work, cutting or rewriting poems he judged dishonest. "September 1, 1939," written as the war began, he came to find rhetorically false, and he suppressed the line "We must love one another or die" as a lie, since we die regardless. The revisions are themselves part of the record: a writer holding his own early certainties to account.

The Christian poems belong to the American years. For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, written in 1941 and 1942 after his mother's death, sets the Nativity among the anxieties of modern life, ending with the Narrator's meditation that the Christmas feast is over and ordinary time returns, a sober account of what faith asks once the festival is done. The Sea and the Mirror, a commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest, explores the gap between art and grace. The Age of Anxiety won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and gave a name to the period. In prose, The Dyer's Hand and Secondary Worlds reflected on art and belief, and his essays on Kierkegaard and Charles Williams show whom he trusted. He rarely wrote devotional verse in the manner of the older mystics. His Christianity speaks through irony and conversation, through the sense that the ordinary world is always being addressed from beyond it. The late poem sequence Horae Canonicae, built on the canonical hours of the Divine Office and centered on the Passion, is his most sustained work of liturgical imagination. In his later years he wrote with deliberate plainness, preferring the humble and the particular to the grand, and insisting that poetry makes nothing happen but survives as a way of happening, a mouth.

His influence on English-language poetry is hard to overstate. Poets as different as Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Joseph Brodsky, and John Ashbery owed him formal ease and moral intelligence, and his example, a mind trained in psychology and politics arriving at orthodox Christian belief, has been cited by later Christian writers from Rowan Williams to Marilyn Robinson's readers as a model of faith without sentimentality. The reception was not uniform. Some admirers found the religious poems less urgent than the early ones, and critics on both sides doubted the sincerity of a conversion pursued without public confession or visible discipleship in the usual sense. His reputation dipped in the decades after his death, then rose again, aided by a wider interest in poets who combine intellect with devotion. Increasingly he is read less as a political chronicler than as a theological poet, and the Anglican liturgy that he loved has itself found in him a lay witness.

Who should read Auden: Readers who distrust religious writing that arrives too quickly at comfort, and who want a faith that has passed through doubt, politics, and personal compromise and kept its sense of humor. He is valuable for those who think and pray in images and cadence rather than in propositions, and for anyone curious how a modern intellect came back to the Church by way of disillusion. He is not for readers seeking devotional instruction, doctrinal clarity, or a settled account of how holiness and an unresolved life fit together. Auden leaves that question open, and asks the reader to hold it with him.