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WH Auden birth anniversary: Interesting facts and quotes by English-American poet
In 1930, a 23-year-old poet published his first book Poems, which catapulted him to fame. However, it was the long poem The Age of Anxiety, written in 1947, that earned Wystan Hugh Auden the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and cemented his name in the annals of history.
In 1930, a 23-year-old poet published his first book Poems, which catapulted him to fame. However, it was the long poem The Age of Anxiety, written in 1947, that earned Wystan Hugh Auden the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and cemented his name in the annals of history.
Born on February 21, 1907, the English-American poet, more popularly remembered as WH Auden, is not only known for poems on love, politics, religion and cultural and psychological themes but is noted for his stylistic and technical prowess in versification.
Born in York, UK, Auden moved to the US in 1939 and for the rest of his life lived between New York in the US and Kirchstetten in Austria.
ALSO READ: WH Auden and political poetry: The English bard who struck an idiosyncratic note
The man behind such eternal works as The Shield of Achilles, The Age of Anxiety, Funeral Blues and the long poem For the Time Being, he is often credited with some endearing lines and voices, here’s looking at a few.
-- Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
-- We must love one another or die.
-- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
-- If equal affection cannot be,/ Let the more loving one be me.
-- Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
-- Evil is unspectacular and always human,
-- And shares our bed and eats at our own table...
WH Auden began writing poems while he was still in school. His first poem was written in the year 1922, at 15 years of age and was titled California.
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Auden published about 400 poems in his illustrious character, which included seven long poems. Two of these were of book-length. The tone of his poems ranged from popular clichés to complex philosophical meditations.
Auden also wrote more than 400 essays and numerous reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects. He even worked on documentary films, poetic plays, and other performing arts.
Later in life, Auden rejected poems that he had earlier written claiming he found them to be boring or dishonest; expressing views which he thought was rhetorically effective at that point in time.
The stature of Auden in modern literature, however, is contested, with two schools of thoughts ranking him either to be the most prominent or the least prominent of the three major twentieth-century British and Irish poets, along with William Butler Yeats and TS Eliot.
In 1935, Auden tied the knot to Erika Mann. The marriage was aimed at helping her obtain British citizenship and escape the Nazis. The two later separated.
The marriage was one of Auden’s many acts of kindness he was known for. The poet, however, was originally, in a relationship with Christopher Isherwood and later fell in love with Chester Kallman. The relationship with Kallman ended after he refused to accept Auden’s demand for mutual exclusivity. The two would maintain their friendship and even lived in the same house till Auden’s death.
WH Auden died in Vienna on September 29, 1973, barely hours after giving a reading of his poems at the Austrian Society for Literature.
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