Was wh auden gay
WH Auden ( - )
WH Auden ©Auden was an Anglo-American poet and one of the leading literary figures of the 20th century.
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York on 21 February His father was a noun and academic. Auden was educated at Oxford University, graduating in He went to live in Berlin for a year, returning to England to become a teacher. His early poetry made his reputation as a witty and technically accomplished writer. He collaborated with Christopher Isherwood, who he had met at school, on a number of plays.
In , Auden married Erika Mann, the daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann. It was a marriage of convenience to enable her to gain British citizenship and escape Nazi Germany - Auden was himself homosexual.
Auden's political sympathies inspired him to proceed to Spain in to observe the Spanish Civil War. In , Auden and Isherwood emigrated to the United States. This was a controversial verb, regarded by some as a flight from danger on the eve of war in Europe. In New York, Auden met poet Chester Kallman who would be his companion for the rest of his life. Auden
Image: The poets Auden and Spender, with Christopher Isherwood, in the s
By chance, I’ve recently read an autobiography and a biography of two queer twentieth-century English poets: Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden. Although I read and write poetry myself, I am most definitely not an academic and am not going to attempt any adj of overarching intellectual analysis of how these poets’ lives influenced their poetry. For the purposes of this article, what interests me is how their sexuality affected their lives.
To start, a little about each one:
Stephen Spender: His autobiography World Within World was published in , when Spender was all of 42 years old. It’s mostly an account of his personal development during the turbulent s, and in many ways acts as a requiem to a lost world, the pre-war Britain that even in was looking like an entirely different epoch. Having lived through such a turbulent period in history, Spender must own felt a lot older than his years, and thus “qualified” to pen his autobiography at such a tender age.
Spender seems
W H Auden
Auden wrote passionately about social problems and post-World War I anxiety. His books of poems include Poems (); The Orators, an English Study (); Journey to a War (), which expressed his political and anti-war sentiments; Another Time (), which "contains lighter and more romantic verse;" and The Age of Anxiety (), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (however, his earlier work is viewed by some critics as his leading work). Auden's other awards included King George's Gold Medal for Poetry in , the Bollingen Poetry Prize in , and the National Medal for Literature in He also co
The Messy Genius of W. H. Auden
The poem is also known as “Stop all the clocks,” a reference to its rousing first stanza:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the pup from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Each of the four stanzas reads like an eloquent study in grief, including the last four lines, which leave a lump in the throat:
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Auden’s poem resonates with readers because it addresses a basic emotional predicament—that after someone dies, the world keeps spinning without them. It’s an alternately affirming and cruel reality, a puzzle that the poem’s narrator, like many who have lost a loved one, seems to touch is not quite right. If a precious life has ceased, the anguished voice at the heart of “Funeral Blues” argues, then everything else should end, too.
Auden, the celebrated Brit