W. H. Auden

2.1. Early Life and Education

Wystan Hugh Auden was born on 21 February 1907, at 54 Bootham, York, England. His father, George Augustus Auden (1872-1957), was a physician and lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health, whose library sparked Auden's lifelong interest in psychoanalysis. His mother, Constance Rosalie Auden (née Bicknell; 1869-1941), had trained as a missionary nurse but never served abroad. Wystan was the youngest of three sons; his elder brother, George Bernard Auden (1900-1978), became a farmer, and his second brother, John Bicknell Auden (1903-1991), became a geologist.

The Auden family had minor gentry roots and a strong clerical tradition, originally from Rowley Regis and later Horninglow, Staffordshire. Both of Auden's grandfathers were Church of England clergymen. He grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household that practiced a "high" form of Anglicanism, with doctrines and rituals closely resembling those of Catholicism. Auden later attributed his love for music and language, in part, to the church services he attended in his childhood. He believed himself to be of Icelandic descent, a belief that fostered a lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas, evident in his work.

In 1908, when Auden was one year old, his family moved to Homer Road in Solihull, near Birmingham. From the age of eight, he attended boarding schools, returning home only for holidays. His experiences visiting the Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining industry deeply influenced many of his poems; the remote, decaying mining village of Rookhope became a "sacred landscape" for him, later evoked in his poem "Amor Loci". Until the age of fifteen, Auden had intended to become a mining engineer, but his passion for words had already taken root. He famously remarked later, "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do."

Auden attended St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he first met Christopher Isherwood, who would later become a renowned novelist and collaborator. At thirteen, Auden transferred to Gresham's School in Holt, Norfolk. It was there, in 1922, that he realized his vocation as a poet after a friend, Robert Medley, inquired if he wrote poetry. Soon after, he experienced a gradual loss of faith, a realization of diminished interest in religion rather than a sudden shift in views. During school productions of Shakespeare, Auden played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922 and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his final year at Gresham's. A review noted his ability to "infuse considerable dignity into his passionate outbursts" as Katherina. His first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923. Auden later contributed a chapter on Gresham's to Graham Greene's The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (1934).

In 1925, Auden entered Christ Church, Oxford, on a biology scholarship, but switched to English in his second year. At Oxford, he was introduced to Old English poetry through the lectures of J. R. R. Tolkien. He formed friendships with fellow students such as Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. These four poets were collectively, though sometimes inaccurately, identified in the 1930s as the "Auden Group" due to their shared (though not identical) left-wing political views. Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a third-class degree.

Auden was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925, and for several years, he sent poems to Isherwood for comments and critique. Their relationship included periods of sexual intimacy, interspersed with other romantic interests. Between 1935 and 1939, they collaborated on three plays and a travel book. Throughout his Oxford years and beyond, Auden's friends consistently described him as witty, extravagant, empathetic, and generous, yet, partly by his own choice, often lonely. In group settings, he could be comically dogmatic and overbearing, but in private, he was often diffident and shy unless he felt welcomed. He was known for his punctuality in habits and his obsession with meeting deadlines, despite living amidst physical disarray.

2.2. Early Career and British Period (1928-1938)

In late 1928, Auden departed Britain for nine months, residing in Berlin. This move was partly an escape from the more repressive social atmosphere in England, particularly concerning homosexuality. In Berlin, he encountered firsthand the political and economic instability that would become a central subject in his writing. During this period, Stephen Spender privately printed a small pamphlet of Auden's Poems, with about 45 copies distributed among their friends and family, often referred to as Poems [1928] to distinguish it from his later commercially published volume.

Upon his return to Britain in 1929, Auden briefly worked as a tutor. In 1930, his first commercially published book, Poems (1930), was accepted by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber, which remained his primary British publisher. That same year, he began a five-year career as a schoolmaster in boys' schools: two years at Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, Scotland, followed by three years at The Downs School in the Malvern Hills, where he was highly regarded as a teacher. It was at the Downs School, in June 1933, that Auden experienced what he later termed a "Vision of Agape". While sitting with three fellow teachers, he suddenly felt a profound love for them, perceiving their existence as having infinite value. This experience, he stated, later influenced his decision to return to the Anglican Church in 1940.

During these years, Auden's romantic interests tended to focus on an idealized "Alter Ego" rather than specific individuals. His relationships, including his unsuccessful courtships, were often imbalanced in terms of age or intelligence, and his sexual encounters were typically transient, though some evolved into lasting friendships. He later contrasted these relationships with what he considered the "marriage" (his own term) of equals he began with Chester Kallman in 1939, founded on the unique individuality of both partners.

In 1935, Auden entered into a marriage of convenience with Erika Mann (1905-1969), the bisexual novelist and daughter of Thomas Mann. This marriage was orchestrated after it became clear that the Nazi regime intended to strip her of her German citizenship. Mann had initially approached Christopher Isherwood for such an arrangement to obtain British citizenship, but he declined and suggested Auden, who readily agreed. Auden and Mann never lived together, yet they maintained amicable relations throughout their lives, remaining legally married until Mann's death in 1969, at which point she left him a small bequest. In a similar vein, in 1936, Auden introduced actress Therese Giehse, Mann's lover, to the writer John Hampson, leading to another marriage of convenience so that Giehse could also leave Germany.

From 1935 until his departure from Britain in early 1939, Auden worked as a freelance reviewer, essayist, and lecturer. He began with the GPO Film Unit, a documentary film-making division of the post office led by John Grierson. Through his work there in 1935, he met and collaborated with Benjamin Britten, with whom he also worked on plays, song cycles, and a libretto. Auden's plays in the 1930s were staged by the Group Theatre, with varying degrees of his direct supervision.

His work during this period reflected his conviction that any good artist must be "more than a bit of a reporting journalist." In 1936, Auden spent three months in Iceland, gathering material for the travel book Letters from Iceland (1937), co-authored with Louis MacNeice. In 1937, he traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic. However, he was assigned to write propaganda at the Republican press and propaganda office, where he felt ineffective, leaving after only a week. He returned to England after a brief visit to the front at Sarineña. This seven-week visit profoundly impacted him, and his social views became more nuanced as he confronted political realities that were more ambiguous and troubling than he had anticipated. Continuing his blend of reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, collaborating on their book Journey to a War (1939). On their return journey to England, they briefly stopped in New York and decided to relocate to the United States. Auden spent late 1938 partly in England and partly in Brussels.

Many of Auden's poems from the 1930s and later were inspired by unrequited or unconsummated love. In the 1950s, he famously encapsulated his emotional philosophy in the couplet: "If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me" (from "The More Loving One"). He possessed a notable talent for friendship and, from the late 1930s, a strong desire for the stability of marriage, which he called "the only subject" in a letter to his friend James Stern. Throughout his life, Auden performed numerous charitable acts, sometimes publicly, as in his 1935 marriage of convenience to Erika Mann, but increasingly in private in his later years. He was often embarrassed when these acts were revealed publicly, such as when his gift to his friend Dorothy Day for the Catholic Worker movement was reported on the front page of The New York Times in 1956.

2.3. American Period (1939-1973)

Auden and Isherwood arrived in New York City in January 1939 on temporary visas. Their departure from Britain, occurring just before World War II, was widely perceived by many as a betrayal, leading to a temporary decline in Auden's public reputation. In April 1939, Isherwood moved to California, and their meetings became intermittent thereafter. Around this time, Auden met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next two years. Auden described their relationship as a "marriage" that commenced with a cross-country "honeymoon" journey.

In 1941, Kallman ended their sexual relationship due to his inability to accept Auden's insistence on mutual fidelity. However, Auden and Kallman remained close companions for the remainder of Auden's life, sharing houses and apartments from 1953 until Auden's death. Auden dedicated both editions of his collected poetry (1945/50 and 1966) to Isherwood and Kallman, acknowledging their profound significance in his life.

From 1940 to 1941, Auden resided in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, New York, which he shared with notable artists such as Carson McCullers and Benjamin Britten. This residence became a celebrated hub of artistic activity, affectionately nicknamed "February House". In 1940, Auden rejoined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had left at fifteen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams, whom he met in 1937, and partly by his readings of Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr. This existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central and enduring element of his life.

After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Auden informed the British embassy in Washington that he was prepared to return to the UK if needed. He was advised that only qualified personnel of his age (32) were required. From 1941 to 1942, he taught English at the University of Michigan. He was called for the draft in the United States Army in August 1942 but was rejected on medical grounds. Although he had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1942-43, he chose not to use it, opting instead to teach at Swarthmore College from 1942 to 1945.

In mid-1945, following the end of World War II in Europe, Auden was in Germany with the US Strategic Bombing Survey, investigating the effects of Allied bombing on German morale. This experience profoundly influenced his postwar work, similar to how his earlier visit to Spain had shaped his earlier writing. Upon his return, he settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer, a lecturer at The New School for Social Research, and a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American colleges. In 1946, he became a naturalised citizen of the United States, while retaining his British citizenship.

From 1948 onward, Auden began spending his summers in Europe with Chester Kallman, initially in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house. From 1958, he started spending his summers in Kirchstetten, Austria, having purchased a farmhouse there with the prize money from the Premio Feltrinelli, awarded to him in 1957. He expressed profound joy at owning a home for the first time, reportedly shedding tears of happiness. His later poetry, largely composed in Austria, includes the sequence "Thanksgiving for a Habitat", which reflects on his Kirchstetten home. [https://amp.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/ Auden's letters and papers sent to his friend, translator Stella Musulin (1915-1996), available online,] offer valuable insights into his Austrian years.

From 1956 to 1961, Auden served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a position that required him to deliver three lectures annually. This relatively light academic workload allowed him to continue spending winters in New York, where he lived at 77 St. Mark's Place in Manhattan's East Village, and summers in Europe. He spent only three weeks each year lecturing in Oxford. His income was primarily derived from reading and lecture tours, as well as contributions to magazines such as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

In 1963, Kallman moved out of the apartment he shared with Auden in New York, spending winters in Athens while continuing to share summers with Auden in Austria. Auden himself spent the winter of 1964-1965 in Berlin as part of an artist-in-residence program supported by the Ford Foundation.

Following several years of advocacy by his friend David Luke, Auden's former college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage on its grounds in February 1972. He relocated his books and other belongings from New York to Oxford in September 1972, continuing to spend summers in Austria with Kallman. He lived only one winter in Oxford before his death in 1973.

3.1. Poetic Works

Auden published approximately four hundred poems, including seven long poems, two of which were book-length. His poetic style was encyclopedic in scope and method, varying from obscure twentieth-century modernism to lucid traditional forms like ballads and limericks, from doggerel to haiku and villanelles, and even a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from trivial personal details to grand cosmic themes, and from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.

3.1.1. Early Poetic Works (1922-1939)

Auden began writing poetry in 1922, at the age of 15. His earliest works largely adopted the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, particularly William Wordsworth, and later poets with rural interests, such as Thomas Hardy. By age 18, he discovered T. S. Eliot and initially embraced an extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his distinct voice at 20 with "From the very first coming down," the first poem later included in his collected work. This poem and others from the late 1920s often featured a clipped, elusive style that alluded to themes of loneliness and loss without directly stating them. Twenty of these poems appeared in his first book, Poems (1928), a pamphlet hand-printed by Stephen Spender.

In 1928, he penned his first dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides, subtitled "A Charade." This piece innovatively combined stylistic elements and content from Icelandic sagas with jokes derived from English school life. This blend of tragedy and farce, featuring a dream play-within-a-play, foreshadowed the mixed styles and diverse content that would characterize much of his subsequent work. This drama, along with thirty short poems, was included in his first commercially published book, Poems (1930; 2nd edition with seven poems replaced, 1933). The poems in this collection were primarily lyrical and gnomic meditations on hoped-for or unfulfilled love, and on themes of personal, social, and seasonal renewal. Notable poems from this period include "It was Easter as I walked", "Doom is dark", "Sir, no man's enemy", and "This lunar beauty". A recurring motif in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts," Auden's term for the powerful, unseen psychological impacts of preceding generations on individual lives, also the title of a specific poem. A parallel theme, present throughout his entire body of work, is the contrast between biological evolution (unchosen and involuntary) and the psychological evolution of cultures and individuals (which is voluntary and deliberate, even in its subconscious aspects).

Auden's next major work was The Orators: An English Study (1932; revised editions, 1934, 1966), a blend of verse and prose largely exploring hero-worship in both personal and political contexts. His shorter poems during this period became more open and accessible. The spirited "Six Odes" in The Orators reflect his newfound interest in Robert Burns. Over the next few years, many of his poems drew their form and style from traditional ballads and popular songs, as well as from expansive classical forms like the Odes of Horace, which he likely encountered through the German poet Hölderlin. Around this time, his primary influences were Dante, William Langland, and Alexander Pope.

During these years, much of Auden's work expressed left-wing views, and he became widely recognized as a political poet. However, he was privately more ambivalent about revolutionary politics than many reviewers acknowledged. Edward Mendelson suggests that Auden articulated political views partly from a sense of moral duty and partly to enhance his reputation, and that he later regretted this approach. He frequently framed revolutionary change as a "change of heart," envisioning a societal transformation from a psychology of fear and closed-mindedness to an open psychology of love.

His verse drama The Dance of Death (1933) was a political spectacle structured like a theatrical revue, which Auden later dismissed as "a nihilistic leg-pull." His subsequent play, The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), co-written with Isherwood, was a quasi-Marxist reimagining of Gilbert and Sullivan, where the overarching concept of social transformation superseded any specific political action or structure.

The Ascent of F6 (1937), another play collaboratively written with Isherwood, functioned partly as an anti-imperialist satire. It also served, through the character of the self-destructive climber Michael Ransom, as an introspection into Auden's own motivations for adopting a public role as a political poet. This play featured the first version of "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), initially conceived as a satiric eulogy for a politician. Auden later revised the poem into a "Cabaret Song" about lost love, intended to be sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson, for whom he composed many lyrics in the 1930s. In 1935, Auden briefly worked on documentary films with the GPO Film Unit, composing his renowned verse commentary for Night Mail and lyrics for other films, which were part of his broader effort in the 1930s to create a widely accessible, socially conscious art.

In 1936, Auden's publisher chose the title Look, Stranger! for a collection encompassing political odes, love poems, comic songs, meditative lyrics, and a variety of intellectually intense but emotionally accessible verse. Auden disliked the title and re-titled the collection On This Island for its 1937 US edition. Poems included in the book are "Hearing of harvests", "Out on the lawn I lie in bed", "O what is that sound", "Look, stranger, on this island now" (later revised to "at"), and "Our hunting fathers".

Auden now advocated for the artist to function as a kind of journalist, a view he put into practice in Letters from Iceland (1937), a travel book in prose and verse co-written with Louis MacNeice, which featured his long social, literary, and autobiographical commentary, "Letter to Lord Byron." In 1937, after observing the Spanish Civil War, he wrote the politically engaged pamphlet poem Spain (1937), which he later chose to exclude from his collected works. Journey to a War (1939), another travel book in prose and verse, was a result of his visit to the Second Sino-Japanese War with Isherwood. Auden's final collaboration with Isherwood was their third play, On the Frontier, an anti-war satire styled for Broadway and West End stages.

Auden's shorter poems of this period explored the fragility and transient nature of personal love, seen in pieces like "Danse Macabre," "The Dream," and "Lay your sleeping head." He addressed this subject with ironic wit in his "Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson" (which included "Tell Me the Truth About Love" and the revised "Funeral Blues"). He also examined the corrupting influence of public and official culture on individual lives in poems such as "Casino," "School Children," and "Dover." In 1938, he composed a series of dark, ironic ballads focusing on individual failure, including "Miss Gee," "James Honeyman," and "Victor." All these works appeared in Another Time (1940), alongside poems such as "Dover", "As He Is", and "Musée des Beaux Arts" (all written before his 1939 move to America), and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "The Unknown Citizen", "Law Like Love", "September 1, 1939", and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (all written after his arrival in America). The elegies for Yeats and Freud notably feature anti-heroic statements, portraying great achievements not as exclusive to unique geniuses beyond imitation, but as deeds performed by otherwise ordinary individuals who were "silly like us" (Yeats) or of whom it could be said "he wasn't clever at all" (Freud), individuals who became teachers rather than awe-inspiring heroes.

3.1.2. Middle Period Poetic Works (1940-1957)

In 1940, Auden composed "New Year Letter," a long philosophical poem that was published along with miscellaneous notes and other poems in The Double Man (1941). Around the time of his return to the Anglican Communion, he began writing abstract verse on theological themes, such as "Canzone" and "Kairos and Logos." By about 1942, as he became more comfortable with religious subjects, his verse style became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly employed the syllabic verse he had learned from the poetry of Marianne Moore.

Auden's work during this era frequently addressed the artist's temptation to exploit other individuals as mere material for art, rather than valuing them for their own sake ("Prospero to Ariel"), and the corresponding moral imperative to make and uphold commitments despite the temptation to break them ("In Sickness and Health"). From 1942 through 1947, he primarily focused on three long poems in dramatic form, each distinct in its structure and content: "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio," "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest" (both published in For the Time Being, 1944), and The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (published separately in 1947). The first two, along with Auden's other new poems from 1940 to 1944, were included in his first collected edition, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), which also featured most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions.

After completing The Age of Anxiety in 1946, Auden redirected his focus to shorter poems, most notably "A Walk After Dark," "The Love Feast," and "The Fall of Rome." Many of these poems evoked the atmosphere of the Italian village where he spent his summers between 1948 and 1957. His subsequent book, Nones (1951), exuded a new Mediterranean sensibility previously absent from his work. A significant new theme that emerged was the "sacred importance" of the human body in its ordinary aspects (such as breathing, sleeping, and eating), and the connection to nature that the body facilitates, in contrast to the division between humanity and nature that he had emphasized in the 1930s. His poems exploring these themes included "In Praise of Limestone" (1948) and "Memorial for the City" (1949). In 1947-1948, Auden and Kallman collaborated on the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, and later on two libretti for operas by Hans Werner Henze.

Auden's first standalone prose book was The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1950), which was based on a series of lectures examining the image of the sea in romantic literature. Between 1949 and 1954, he worked on a sequence of seven Good Friday poems, collectively titled "Horae Canonicae". This sequence presented an encyclopedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history, centered on the irreversible act of murder, while also exploring cyclical and linear concepts of time. Concurrently, he wrote "Bucolics," a sequence of seven poems contemplating humanity's relationship with nature. Both sequences appeared in his next book, The Shield of Achilles (1955), along with other short poems, including the collection's title poem, "Fleet Visit," and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier."

In 1955-1956, Auden composed a group of poems exploring "history," a term he used to denote the unique events shaped by human choices, as distinct from "nature," which he defined as involuntary events produced by natural processes, statistics, and anonymous forces like crowds. These poems included "T the Great," "The Maker," and the title poem of his subsequent collection, Homage to Clio (1960).

3.1.3. Later Poetic Works (1958-1973)

In the late 1950s, Auden's poetic style became less rhetorical while concurrently expanding its range. In 1958, after relocating his summer residence from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno." Other poems from this period include "Dichtung und Wahrheit: An Unwritten Poem," a prose poem reflecting on the relationship between love and personal and poetic language, and the contrasting "Dame Kind," which explores the anonymous, impersonal reproductive instinct. These works, along with his 1955-1956 poems on history, were collected in Homage to Clio (1960). His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) compiled many of the lectures he delivered as Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1961, alongside revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s.

Among the new styles and forms that emerged in Auden's later work were haiku and tanka, which he began writing after translating the haiku and other verse found in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings. A sequence of fifteen poems about his house in Austria, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" (written in various styles, including an imitation of William Carlos Williams), appeared in About the House (1965), along with other poems such as "On the Circuit," a reflection on his lecture tours. In the late 1960s, he composed some of his most vigorous poems, including "River Profile" and two retrospective pieces reflecting on his life, "Prologue at Sixty" and "Forty Years On." All of these were published in City Without Walls (1969). His lifelong fascination with Icelandic legend culminated in his verse translation of The Elder Edda (1969). Among his later themes was the concept of "religionless Christianity," which he partly derived from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the dedicatee of his poem "Friday's Child."

A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) offered a unique self-portrait composed of his favorite quotations accompanied by his commentary, arranged alphabetically by subject. His final prose book was a selection of essays and reviews, Forewords and Afterwords (1973). His last volumes of verse, Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the unfinished Thank You, Fog (published posthumously in 1974), include reflective poems on language ("Natural Linguistics," "Aubade"), philosophy and science ("No, Plato, No," "Unpredictable but Providential"), and his own aging ("A New Year Greeting," "Talking to Myself"-which he dedicated to his friend Oliver Sacks-and "A Lullaby" ["The din of work is subdued"]). His last completed poem was "Archaeology," which revisited the recurring themes of ritual and timelessness in his later years.

3.2. Prose and Collaborations

Beyond his vast poetic output, Auden was a prolific writer of prose, authoring more than four hundred essays and reviews covering a wide array of subjects including literature, history, politics, music, and religion. He famously stated in 1964 that "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . . . than any sexual relations I have had." This sentiment was borne out in his significant collaborative efforts.

He partnered with Christopher Isherwood on several plays, and with Chester Kallman on notable opera libretti, including The Rake's Progress for Igor Stravinsky and two libretti for operas by Hans Werner Henze. In the 1930s, Auden also worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films, notably for the GPO Film Unit, contributing his famous verse commentary for Night Mail. Later in the 1950s and 1960s, he collaborated with the New York Pro Musica early music group.

7.1. Critical Reception

Auden's standing in modern literature has been consistently debated, with critical opinions often ranging from sharply dismissive to strongly affirmative. From the 1930s onward, a common view positioned him as the last and perhaps least significant of the three major 20th-century poets from the UK or Ireland, behind W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. However, a growing minority view, particularly prominent in more recent years, ranks him as the foremost among them. Critical assessments have varied widely; for example, Hugh MacDiarmid called him "a complete wash-out," while F. R. Leavis criticized Auden's ironic style as "self-defensive, self-indulgent or merely irresponsible." Harold Bloom famously suggested, "Close thy Auden, open thy [Wallace] Stevens." In stark contrast, The Times obituarist declared, "W.H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry... emerges as its undisputed master," and Joseph Brodsky even proclaimed Auden possessed "the greatest mind of the twentieth century."

Critical estimates were divided from the very beginning. Reviewing Auden's first book, Poems (1930), Naomi Mitchison optimistically wrote, "If this is really only the beginning, we have perhaps a master to look forward to." Yet, in 1934, John Sparrow, while recalling Mitchison's comment, dismissed Auden's early work as "a monument to the misguided aims that prevail among contemporary poets, and the fact that... he is being hailed as 'a master' shows how criticism is helping poetry on the downward path."

Auden's clipped, satiric, and ironic style in the 1930s proved highly influential, being widely imitated by younger poets such as Charles Madge, who wrote, "there waited for me in the summer morning / Auden fiercely. I read, shuddered, and knew." He was frequently characterized as the leader of an "Auden group," which included his friends Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. These four were satirically dubbed "Macspaunday" by the poet Roy Campbell, implying they were an indistinguishable collective. Auden's propagandistic verse plays, such as The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6, and his political poems like "Spain," cemented his reputation as a political poet whose voice was both progressive and accessible, contrasting with the more detached style of Eliot. This political stance, however, also drew opposing views; Austin Clarke described Auden's work as "liberal, democratic, and humane," while John Drummond argued that Auden misused a "characteristic and popularizing trick, the generalized image" to present ostensibly left-wing views that were, in fact, "confined to bourgeois experience."

Auden's decision to emigrate to America in 1939 sparked considerable debate in Britain, even reaching Parliament, with some interpreting his departure as an act of betrayal. Despite this, defenders like Geoffrey Grigson, in a 1949 anthology of modern poetry, asserted that Auden "arches over all." His significant stature was further implied by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes (1977).

In the United States, starting in the late 1930s, the detached and ironic tone of Auden's regular stanzas became highly influential. John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s, Auden "was the modern poet." Auden's formal influences were so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Beat Generation emerged partly as a reaction against his dominance. From the 1940s through the 1960s, many critics lamented what they perceived as a decline in Auden's work from its earlier promise. Randall Jarrell published a series of essays critiquing Auden's later output, and Philip Larkin's widely impactful poem "What's Become of Wystan?" (1960) echoed similar sentiments.

The first comprehensive study of Auden's work was Richard Hoggart's Auden: An Introductory Essay (1951), which concluded that "Auden's work, then, is a civilising force." This was followed by Joseph Warren Beach's The Making of the Auden Canon (1957), which offered a disapproving account of Auden's revisions to his earlier work. The first systematic critical analysis was Monroe K. Spears' The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (1963), written from the conviction that "Auden's poetry can offer the reader entertainment, instruction, intellectual excitement, and a prodigal variety of aesthetic pleasures, all in a generous abundance that is unique in our time."

Auden was recommended as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Nobel Committee to the Swedish Academy in 1963, 1964, and 1965, and was a final candidate in 1968. By the time of his death in 1973, he had achieved the status of a respected elder statesman in literature. In 1974, a memorial stone for him was placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The Encyclopædia Britannica notes that "by the time of Eliot's death in 1965... a convincing case could be made for the assertion that Auden was indeed Eliot's successor, as Eliot had inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats died in 1939." Generally, British critics tended to regard his early work as his best, while American critics often favored his middle and later periods.

Another group of critics and poets has maintained that, unlike many other modern poets, Auden's reputation did not wane after his death. The influence of his later writing was particularly strong on younger American poets, including John Ashbery, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, and Maxine Kumin. Typical contemporary evaluations describe him as "arguably the [20th] century's greatest poet" (Peter Parker and Frank Kermode), who "now clearly seems the greatest poet in English since Tennyson" (Philip Hensher).

7.2. Cultural Influence and Recognition

W. H. Auden's cultural influence expanded significantly, particularly through his association with other prominent figures and through popular media. He became a close friend of neurologist Oliver Sacks. After the publication of Sacks's first book, Migraine, in 1970, Auden's encouraging review prompted Sacks to adopt a more metaphorical and mythical writing style.

Public recognition of Auden's work sharply increased after his poem "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") was read aloud in the popular film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). Subsequently, a pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold over 275,000 copies. An excerpt from his poem "As I walked out one evening" was recited in the film Before Sunrise (1995). Following the events of 11 September 2001, his 1939 poem "September 1, 1939" gained widespread circulation and frequent broadcast, resonating deeply with the public due to its perceived relevance to the times. In 2007, his centenary year was marked by numerous public readings and broadcast tributes in both the UK and the US.

Memorials and plaques commemorating Auden's life and work are situated in various locations: in Westminster Abbey; at his birthplace at 55 Bootham, York; near his childhood home on Lordswood Road, Birmingham; in the chapel of Christ Church, Oxford; on the site of his apartment at 1 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn Heights; at his apartment at 77 St. Mark's Place, New York (though this plaque has since been damaged and removed); at the site of his death at Walfischgasse 5 in Vienna; and in the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco, which recognizes LGBT individuals who have made significant contributions. In Kirchstetten, Austria, his study in his former farmhouse is accessible to the public upon request.

In 2023, newly declassified UK government files revealed that Auden had been considered as a candidate to become the new Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1967, following the death of John Masefield. However, he was ultimately rejected for the position due to having acquired American citizenship.