The Oxford Companion to English Literature | 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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