W H Auden
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Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, North Yorkshire, as the son of George Augustus Auden, a distinguished physician, and Rosalie (Bicknell) Auden. Solihull in the West Midlands, where Auden was brought up, remained important to him as a poet. Auden was educated at St. Edmunds Hindhood and then at Greshams School, Holt, Norfolk. In 1925 he entered Christ Church, Oxford. Audens studies and writing progressed without much success: he took a disappointing third-class degree in English. And his first collection of poems was rejected by T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber. At one time in his undergraduate years he planned to become a biologist. From 1928 to 1929 he lived in Berlin, where he took advantage of the sexually liberal atmosphere, and was introduced to the psychological theories of Homer Lane.
After returning to England Auden taught at a prep school, in 1930 privately in London, at Larchfield Academy, a boys school in Helensburgh (Scotland), and at Downs School, Colwall, Herefordshire in 1932-35. He was staff member of GPO film Unit (1935-36), making documentaries such as Night Mail (1935). Music for this film was provided by Benjamin Brittein, with whom Auden collaborated on the song-cycle Our Hunting Fathers and on the unsuccessful folk-opera Paul Bunyan. In 1936 Auden traveled in Iceland with Louis MacNeice – Auden believed himself to be of Icelandic descent.
Auden first gained attention in 1930 when his short verse play called Paid on Both Sides was published in T. S. Eliots periodical The Criterion. In the same year appeared Audens POEMS, his first commercially published book, in which he carefully avoided Yeatsian romantic self-expression – the poems were short, untitled, and slightly cryptic. Auden soon gained fame as a leftist intellectual. He showed interest in Marx and Freud and he wrote passionately on social problems, among others in LOOK, STRANGER! (1936). However, by 1962 he argued that art and politics were best kept apart, stating in his essay The Poet and the City that “All political theories which, like Plato, are based on analogies drawn from artistic fabrication are bound, if put into practice, to turn into tyrannies.” Compressed figures of speech, direct statement, and musical effect characterized ON THIS ISLAND (1937) and ANOTHER TIME (1940). In the late 1930s Audens poems were perhaps less radical politically, suffering and injustice are not rejected as a part of ordinary life. The last works from this decade astonished readers with their light comic tone and domesticity.
Auden married in 1935 Thomas Manns daughter Erika Mann, a lesbian actress and journalist, so that she could get a British passport. They met for the first time on their “wedding day”. Of women he once said: “When people are talking they should retire to the kitchen.” In 1937 Auden went to Spain as a civilian and gave radio broadcasts to help the Republican forces. These experiences he recorded in SPAIN (1937). However, he did not actively continue his campaign. Like George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, he became disillusioned with the politics of the struggle. In stead of being welcomed as a supporter of the Republican cause he was ignored because he wasnt a member of the Communist Party.
In the 1930s Auden collaborated with Christopher Isherwood in several plays, and travelled with him in China in 1938. Sex, according to Isherwood, gave their friendship an extra dimension. In January 1939 they emigrated to America and in 1946 Auden became a US citizen. In the 1940s he turned into a religious thinker under the influence of Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), the foremost American Protestant theologian. Auden depicted his conversion to Anglicanism, his mothers faith, in the THE SEA AND THE MIRROR (1944) and FOR THE TIME BEING (1944), in which The Sea and the Mirror, subtitled A Commentary on Shakespeares The Tempest, presented a Christian-allegorical reading of Shakespeares work. The poem can be understood as an allegorical drama, with Prospero representing the conscious ego, Ariel the imagination, and Caliban material needs of fallen creatures. But Audens original mind leaves much to interpretations – his poems challenge the reader to abandon preconceived expectations.
When Statesmen gravely say We must be realistic,
The chances are theyre weak and, therefore, pacifistic,
But when they speak of Principles, look out: perhaps
Their generals are already poring over maps.
(from Shorts in Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957)