Some saw this act as desertion of the home country at the time of its greatest peril. Like other European artists and intellectuals, he spent some time in Spain during the civil war there and wrote one famous and controversial poem about it, "Spain 1937." Although Auden was highly esteemed by the British left, his attitude toward politics, and particularly toward Communist politics, was becoming more and more skeptical.Īs general war in Europe approached, Auden, to the amazement of many people, emigrated to the United States (with Isherwood). She, an actress and journalist, was a vehement anti-Nazi, and the marriage was solely for the purpose of obtaining British citizenship for her.Īuden also traveled a great deal during the 1930s, writing travel books-hodgepodges of verse, journalism, photographs, and personal reflections-about his trips to Iceland (with the poet Louis MacNeice) and (with Isherwood) to China, where he observed the war resulting from Japan's invasion of Manchuria. In 1935, his homosexuality notwithstanding, he married Erika Mann, daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann. Immediately after leaving Oxford, Auden spent a year in Weimar Germany and then returned to England as a teacher and, later, a documentary film writer. In all of English poetry it is difficult to think of any other poet who turned out permanent work so early-and whose work seemed so tense with the obligation to be permanent. characteristic of making anything said sound truer than true.
It was a Shakespearean gift, not just in magnitude but in its unsettling. The plainest statement he could make seemed to come out as poetry. The writer and critic Clive James asks, "Was there ever a more capacious young talent? It goes beyond precocity." He continues: With such messages, they also found a poet of stunning talent. This, at least, was the message many readers heard in Auden's earliest works, Poems (1930), The Orators (1932), and several plays coauthored with Christopher Isherwood.
#Auden age of anxiety text free#
The job of the artist was to help pave the way for a revolution that would destroy the old order and would free individuals for rebirth. Bourgeois society was in its death throes, he believed, its fatal illness manifest in psychosomatic ailments, failed relations, and decaying institutions. Besides his precocious gifts as a versifier and phrasemaker in many forms and idioms, Auden gave voice to the deepest themes of his generation: concern over political and economic crises, suspicion of aestheticism, Marxist and Freudian understandings of self and society, and distrust of established authority, whether in literary, political, religious, or personal life. (English was a new subject at Oxford at that time-1926-and switching was unusual and difficult.) Almost immediately after his graduation in 1928, he became recognized as the most talented of his generation of British poets, indeed as the voice of a new generation. Both parents' interests were reflected in Auden's later life.Īuden was educated in boarding schools and at Oxford University, where he began by studying biology and then switched to English. His father's intellectual interests were broad and included history, archeology, and philosophy his mother was devoutly religious and loved music. Thus Auden grew up in a large industrial town and in a family that was comfortably off, though no more than that. His father was originally in private medical practice when Auden was eighteen months old, the senior Auden became school medical officer for the city of Birmingham. Both his grandfathers were Church of England clergymen.
1973), poet, was born Wystan Hugh Auden in York, England, the son of George Augustus Auden, a physician and public health officer, and Constance Rosalie Bicknell, a nurse.
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