Auden, W. H.
Auden, W. H. , Wystan Hugh Auden ( 1907 – 73 ),the youngest son of a doctor, brought up in Birmingham and educated at Gresham's School, Holt. He began to be taken seriously as a poet while still at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was much influenced by Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry, but also began to explore the means of preserving ‘private spheres’ (through poetry) in ‘public chaos’. Among his contemporaries, who were to share some of his left-wing near-Marxist response to the public chaos of the 1930s, were MacNeice , Day-Lewis , and Spender , with whom his name is often linked. (See Pylon school .) After Oxford, Auden lived for a time in Berlin; he returned to England in 1929 to work as a schoolteacher, but continued to visit Germany regularly, staying with his friend and future collaborator Isherwood . His first volume, Poems (including some previously published in a private...
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