Auden

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He

moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at

Christ s Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by

the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William

Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old

English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately

apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow

writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

In 1928, Auden published his first book of verse, and his

collection Poems, published in 1930, established him as the

leading voice of a new generation. Ever since, he has been

admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to

write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the

incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.

He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.

W. H. Auden was a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Poems (1930)

The Orators prose and verse (1932)

Look, Stranger! in America: On This Island (1936)

Spain (1937)

Another Time (1940)

The Double Man (1941)

The Quest (1941)

For the Time Being (1944)

The Sea and the Mirror (1944)

Collected Poetry (1945)

The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947)

Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944 (1950)

Nones (1952)

The Shield of Achilles (1955)

The Old Man’s Road (1956)

Selected Poetry (1956)

Homage to Clio (1960)

About the House About the House (1965)

Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966)

Collected Longer Poems (1968)

City without Walls (1969)

Academic Graffiti (1971)

Epistle to a Godson (1972)

Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (1974)

Selected Poems (1979)

Collected Poems (1991)

Prose

Letters from Iceland (1937) With L. MacNiece.

Journey to a War (1939) With C. Isherwood.

Enchaféd Flood (1950)

The Dyer’s Hand (1962)

Selected Essays (1964)

Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Anthology

Selected Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf (1972)

Drama

Paid On Both Sides (1928)

The Dance of Death (1933)

The Dog Beneath the Skin: or, Where is Francis? (1935) With C. Isherwood. The Ascent of F.6 (1936) With C. Isherwood.

On the Frontier (1938)

As I Walked Out One Evening

From Another Time

As I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street,

The crowds upon the pavement

Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river

I heard a lover sing

Under an arch of the railway:

“Love has no ending.

“I ll love you, dear, I ll love you

Till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street,

“I ll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry

And the seven stars go squawking

Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits,

For in my arms I hold

The Flower of the Ages,

And the first love of the world.”

But all the clocks in the city

Began to whirr and chime:

“O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time.

“In the burrows of the Nightmare

Where Justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.

“In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day.

“Into many a green valley

Drifts the appalling snow;

Time breaks the threaded dances

And the diver s brilliant bow.

“O plunge your hands in water,

Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

And wonder what you ve missed.

“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

“Where the beggars raffle the banknotes

And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,

And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,

And Jill goes down on her back.

“O look, look in the mirror?

O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

Although you cannot bless.

“O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.

It was late, late in the evening,

The lovers they were gone;

The clocks had ceased their chiming,

And the deep river ran on.

Epitaph on a Tyrant

From Another Time

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

The Fall of Rome

From Another Time

(for Cyril Connolly)

The piers are pummelled by the waves;

In a lonely field the rain

Lashes an abandoned train;

Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;

Agents of the Fisc pursue

Absconding tax-defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send

The temple prostitutes to sleep;

All the literati keep

An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may

Extol the Ancient Disciplines,

But the muscle-bound Marines

Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar s double-bed is warm

As an unimportant clerk

Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK

On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,

Little birds with scarlet legs,

Sitting on their speckled eggs,

Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast.

In Memory of Sigmund Freud

From Another Time

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,

when grief has been made so public, and exposed

to the critique of a whole epoch

the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die

among us, those who were doing us some good,

who knew it was never enough but

hoped to improve a little by living.

Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished

to think of our life from whose unruliness

so many plausible young futures

with threats or flattery ask obedience,

but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes

upon that last picture, common to us all,

of problems like relatives gathered

puzzled and jealous about our dying.

For about him till the very end were still

those he had studied, the fauna of the night,

and shades that still waited to enter

the bright circle of his recognition

turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he

was taken away from his life interest

to go back to the earth in London,

an important Jew who died in exile.

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment

his practice now, and his dingy clientele

who think they can be cured by killing

and covering the garden with ashes.

They are still alive, but in a world he changed

simply by looking back with no false regrets;

all he did was to remember

like the old and be honest like children.

He wasn t clever at all: he merely told

the unhappy Present to recite the Past

like a poetry lesson till sooner

or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,

and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,

how rich life had been and how silly,

and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend

without a wardrobe of excuses, without

a set mask of rectitude or an

embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit

in his technique of unsettlement foresaw

the fall of princes, the collapse of

their lucrative patterns of frustration:

if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life

would become impossible, the monolith

of State be broken and prevented

the co-operation of avengers.

Of course they called on God, but he went his way

down among the lost people like Dante, down

to the stinking fosse where the injured

lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,

deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,

our dishonest mood of denial,

the concupiscence of the oppressor.