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W.H.
Auden, an
English born poet was born in York, England, in 1907 (20th Feb). He made a
remarkable contribution and best known for variety of his works W.H.
Auden has written the best ballads, blues, limericks, sonnets, nonsense
verse, oratorios, free verse, librettos (words) for operas and dramas.
He won the
Pulitzer
Prize in 1946 for his book length poem The age of anxiety,: A baroque eclogue
As an amateur poet in his
younger days, he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse.
He had a remarkable wit and often mimicked the writing styles of these
poets.
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.
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.
In Oxford University, Auden
was the leader of a group of brilliant writers. Later he turned to Christianity
and psychoanalysis as a partial solutions to the problems of civilization.
Auden settled in US in 1939 and later became a US citizen.
Auden has remarkable
contribution but the most known collaboration was with Christopher
Isherwood on travel books and several symbolic and satirical plays in the
1930s. This included The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) and The
Ascent of F6 (1936). He also helped to write Libretto to a Russian
composer Igor Stravinsky's Opera The Rake's Progress. Many of his
essays were published in The Dyer's Hand (1963).
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.
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