W. H. Auden

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Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–73) was an Anglo-American poet. His works include Spain (1937), For the Time Being (1945), The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1948), Collected Shorter Poems, 1930-1944 (1950), Making, Knowing, and Judging (1956), The Dyer's Hand (1962), and Collected Poems (1976). He won a Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Anxiety.[1]

He wrote in a poem called On the Circuit:

God bless the lot of them, although I don't remember which was which
God bless the U.S.A., so large, so friendly, and so rich.

Life and Works

Auden was born February 21, 1907, in York, England, to a doctor and an Anglican, and attended Oxford University.[2] After attending Oxford with scientific training, he became interested in modernist poetry, and joined a sort of gang that spoke of fascism, praised youth, and believed Freudian doctrines, a group later called the "Auden Generation," or the "Oxford Group."[3] He loathed the beauty of Romantic poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, and wrote poems such as "Grub First, then Ethics."[4] He left to travel the world, including his native Iceland, and to serve in the Spanish Civil War, married to become a U.S. citizen, and gave up his love of psychoanalysis and socialism and became a Christian.[5] It is said that he wrote his best poems, including "Stop All the Clocks," ("Funeral Blues,"), during the 1930s.[6] His poetry began with Poems in 1928 and continued to appear in an impressive variety of verse forms.[7] After the Second World War, he showed mastery in both symbolism and technical science, and wrote libretto with the help of his wife, Chester Kallman.[8] He produced many great works at the time, including Another Time (1940), For the Time Being, several classical-style poems based on patterns, and The Rake's Progress (1951), a libretto written for Igor Stravinsky.[9] He died September 29, 1973.

See Also

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