| W. H. Auden | |||||
| 威斯坦·休·奥登 | |||||
阅读奥登 Wystan Hugh Auden在诗海的作品!!! | |||||
奥登奥登（1907年——1973年），英国出生的美国诗人，是继T．S．艾略特之后，正如艾略特是继W．B．叶芝之后，最重要的英语诗人。他的诗以当代社会和政治现实为题材，描写公众关心的理性和道德问题，描写人们的内心世界。晚年他把所有诗篇收集在两个集子里：《短诗结集 1927年——1957年》(1967年)和《长诗结集》(1969年)。
1907年2月21日，奥登出生于英格兰约克郡约克。父祖籍冰岛，父母亲均从事医学工作。他自幼对科学感兴趣，专攻生物学。1922年始写诗，1925年入牛津大学，渐获诗人和哲人的声誉。
奥登的创作可分4个阶段。
第一阶段(1927年——1932年)。在牛津大学文艺青年中形成一个“奥登派”，或称之为“奥登的一代”。他对C．戴·刘易斯、L．麦克尼斯和S．斯彭德等有强烈的影响，这个时期的作品质量不匀，有不少晦涩难懂之处，作品有成名作《双方付钱》和《诗集》(1930年)、《雄辩家》(1932年)等。内容广泛，材料选自冰岛萨迦、古英诗、英国公学故事、K．马克思、S．弗洛伊德及其他心理学家，以及学生幽默，可以说是五光十色的大杂烩。他认为诗与精神分析学类似，能起治疗作用，这一直是奥登诗的基本概念。
在第二阶段(1933年——1938年)，奥登思想激进，具有鲜明的左翼政治观点。继续对资本主义社会的弊端进行分析并对极权主义的出现提出了警告，主要作品有《看吧，陌生人》(1936年)、《死之舞》(音乐宣传剧)以及与C．衣修午德合写的三部诗剧《皮下之狗》(1935年)、《攀登F6》(1936年)和《在边界上》(1938年)。还写了不少散文、书评和报告文学，其中最著名的是游历冰岛时写的《冰岛书简》(1937年)和与衣修午德同访中国后所写的《战地行》(1939年)。1937年对西班牙作短暂旅行后又写了《西班牙》(1937年)。1937年后思想开始从左倾回到基督教。1939年定居美国。
在第三阶段(1939年——1946年)，奥登加入美国籍，思想观点和宗教观经历了重大变化。《另一次》(1940年)包括了他的一些最好的歌曲和现实诗；《双重人》(1941年)描写了他皈依基督教的思想转变。三首长诗包括《暂时》 (1944年)、《海与镜》(1944年)和《忧虑的时代》 (1947年)，各自从宗教、美学和社会心理学的角度说明了奥登1940年之后所有作品的基本信仰和态度。
第四阶段从1948年开始。较长的诗作有《阿喀琉斯之盾》(1955年)、《无城墙的城市》(1969年)等。还与他人合作写了几个歌剧剧本，主要有《浪荡子的历程》(1951年)、《青年恋人们的哀歌》(1961年 )和《巴萨里德一家》(1966年 )。出版了一部文学批评集，《染匠的手》(1962年)。
1953年，奥登获博林根诗歌奖，1956年获全国图书奖。1956年——1961年任牛津大学诗学教授。
1973年9月29日，奥登在奥地利维也纳逝世。
斯蒂芬·斯彭德生平
斯蒂芬·斯彭德（1909年——1995年），英国诗人、评论家。在20世纪30年代以表现那个时期在政治上感到悔恨的左翼“新作品”的诗而享有声誉。
1909年2月28日，斯蒂芬·斯彭德出生于英国伦敦。曾在牛津大学学院求学。早期作品《诗集》(1933年)、《维也纳》(1934年)、诗剧《审判官的考验》(1938年)和《静止的中心》(1939年)，深受德国的R．M．里尔克和西班牙的F．加西亚·洛尔卡的影响。
斯蒂芬·斯彭德的诗歌的最重要特点是表达了一种自我批判和富于同情心的性格。他人道主义和诚实的声誉在后来的诗集中得到充分的证明。这些作品有《废墟与憧憬》 (1942年)、《献诗》(1947年)、《生存的边缘》(1949年)、《诗集》(1955年)、《诗选》(1965年)、《慷慨的日子》 (1971年)和《多尔芬一家》(1994年)。
从40年代起以撰写洞察入微的评论和编辑有影响的期刊《地平线》(1940年——1941年)和《遭遇》(1953年——1967年)而闻名。还写有短篇小说《燃烧的仙人掌》(1936年)、长篇小说《落后的儿子》(1940年)、文学评论《破坏性因素》(1935年)、《创造性因素》 (1953年)、《一首诗的创作》(1955年)、《现代的斗争》(1963年)、自传《世界中的世界》(1951年)和随笔集《三十年代及其后》(1978年)。记述其中国之行的《中国日记》出版于1982年。
第二次世界大战时，当过消防队员(1941年——1944年)。战后曾数次访问美国，在美国各大学任教和讲学。1970年任伦敦大学学院英语教授， 1977年为荣誉退休教授。1983年被封为爵士。
1995年7月16日，斯蒂芬·斯彭德在英国伦敦逝世。
Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined new forms devised by Auden himself with traditional forms and styles. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.
He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") and "September 1, 1939", became widely known through films, broadcasts and popular media.
Childhood and education, 1907-1927
Childhood
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, where his father George Augustus Auden was a physician. Wystan (see note on the source of this name) was the third of three children, all sons; the oldest, George Bernard Auden, became a farmer; the second, John Bicknell Auden, became a geologist. His mother, Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden, had trained as a missionary nurse. Auden's grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen; his household was Anglo-Catholic, following a "High" form of Anglicanism with doctrine and ritual resembling that of Roman Catholicism. Auden traced his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood. He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and sagas is visible throughout his work.
In 1908 his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health; Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays.
From the ages six to twelve, "I spent a great many of my waking hours in the fabrication of a private secondary sacred world, the basic elements of which were (a) a limestone landscape mainly derived from the Pennine Moors in the North of England, and (b) an industry - lead mining". His visits to the Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining industry figure in many of his poems; the remote decaying mining village of Rookhope was for him a "sacred landscape", evoked in a late poem, "Amor Loci".
Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his "passion for words" had already begun. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do".
Education
Auden's first school was St. Edmund's School (Hindhead), Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later famous as a novelist. At thirteen he went to Gresham's School in Norfolk, where, in 1922, his friend Robert Medley first suggested that he might write poetry. Soon after, he "discover[ed] that he has lost his faith" (through a gradual realization that he had lost interest in religion, not through any decisive change of views). He played Caliban in a school production of The Tempest in 1922, and his first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923.
In 1925 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology, but he switched to English by his second year. Friends he met at Oxford included Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender; these four were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a third-class degree.
He was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925; for the next few years Isherwood was his literary mentor to whom he sent poems for comments and criticism. Auden probably fell in love with Isherwood (who was unaware of the intensity of Auden's feelings) and in the 1930s they maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others. In 1935-39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.
From his Oxford years onward, his friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident and shy except when certain of his welcome. He was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while choosing to live amidst physical disorder.
Britain and Europe, 1928-1938
In the autumn of 1928 Auden left Britain for nine months in Weimar Berlin, partly to rebel against English repressiveness in a city where homosexuality was widely tolerated. In Berlin, he said, he first experienced the political and economic unrest that became one of his central subjects.
On returning to Britain in 1929, he worked briefly as a tutor. In 1930 his first published book, Poems (1930), was accepted by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber; the firm also published all his later books. In 1930 he began five years as a schoolmaster in boys' schools: two years at the Larchfield Academy, in Helensburgh, Scotland, then three years at the The Downs School, in the Malvern Hills, where he was a much-loved teacher. At the Downs, in June 1933, he experienced what he later described as a "Vision of Agape," when, while sitting with three fellow-teachers at the school, he suddenly found that he loved them for themselves, that their existence had infinite value for him; this experience, he said, later influenced his decision to return to the Anglican Church in 1940.
During these years, Auden's erotic interests focused, as he later said, on an idealized "Alter Ego" rather than on individual persons. His relations (and his unsuccessful courtships) tended to be unequal either in age or intelligence; his sexual relations were transient, although some evolved into long friendships. He contrasted these relations with what he regarded as the "marriage" (his word) of equals that he began with Chester Kallman in 1939 (see below), based on the unique individuality of both partners.
From the G.P.O. Film Unit's Night Mail; scene possibly directed by AudenFrom 1935 until he left Britain early in 1939, Auden worked as freelance reviewer, essayist, and lecturer, first with the G.P.O. Film Unit, a documentary film-making branch of the post office, headed by John Grierson. He collaborated there with Benjamin Britten, with whom he also worked on plays, song cycles, and a libretto. Auden's plays in the 1930s were performed by the Group Theatre, in productions that he supervised to varying degrees.
His work now reflected his belief that any good artist must be "more than a bit of a reporting journalist". In 1936 he spent three months in Iceland, where he gathered material for a travel book Letters from Iceland (1937), written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice. In 1937 he went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but was put to work broadcasting propaganda, a job he left in order to visit the front. His seven-week visit to Spain affected him deeply, and his social views grew more complex as he found political realities to be more ambiguous and troubling than he had imagined. Again attempting to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 visiting the Sino-Japanese War, working on their book Journey to a War (1939). On their way back to England they stayed briefly in New York and decided to move to the United States. Auden spent the autumn of 1938 partly in England, partly in Brussels.
Many of his poems during the 1930s and afterward were inspired by unconsummated love, and in the 1950s he summarized his emotional life in a famous couplet: "If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me" ("The More Loving One"). He had a gift for friendship and, starting in the late 1930s, a strong wish for the stability of marriage; in a letter to his friend James Stern he called marriage "the only subject". Throughout his life, he performed charitable acts, sometimes in public, as in his marriage of convenience to Erika Mann in 1935 that gave her a British passport with which to escape the Nazis, but, especially in later years, usually in private, and he was embarrassed if they were publicly revealed (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).
United States and Europe, 1939-1973
Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York in January 1939, entering on temporary visas. Their departure from Britain was later seen by many there as a betrayal and Auden's reputation suffered. In April 1939 Isherwood moved to California, and he and Auden saw each other only intermittently in later years. Around this time, Auden met an eighteen-year old poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next two years (Auden described their relation as a "marriage" that began with a cross-country "honeymoon" journey). In 1941 Kallman ended their sexual relations because he could not accept Auden's insistence on a mutual faithful relationship, but he and Auden remained companions for the rest 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.
In 1940-41, Auden lived in a house in Brooklyn Heights which he shared with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others, and which became a famous center of artistic life. In 1940, he joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at thirteen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams, whom he had met in 1937, partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life.
In 1941-42 he taught English at the University of Michigan. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942, but did not use it, choosing instead to teach at Swarthmore College in 1942-45. In the summer of 1945, after the end of World War II in Europe, he was in Germany with the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, studying the effects of Allied bombing on German morale, an experience that affected his postwar work as his visit to Spain had affected him earlier. On his return, he settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer and as a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American colleges. In 1946 he became a naturalized citizen of the US.
His theology in his later years evolved from a highly inward and psychologically oriented Protestantism in the early 1940s to a more Roman Catholic-oriented interest in the significance of the body and in collective ritual in the later 1940s and 1950s, and finally to the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer which rejected "childish" conceptions of God for an adult religion that focused on the significance of human suffering.
Auden began summering in Europe in 1948, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house, then, starting 1958, in Kirchstetten, Austria where he bought a farmhouse, and, he said, shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first time.
In 1951, shortly before the two British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the USSR, Burgess attempted to phone Auden to arrange a vacation visit to Ischia that he had earlier discussed with Auden; Auden never returned the call and had no further contact with either spy, but a media frenzy ensued in which his name was mistakenly associated with their escape. The frenzy was repeated when the MI5 documents on the incident were released in 2007.
In 1956-61, Auden was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University where he was required to give three lectures each year. This fairly light workload allowed him to spend most of his time in New York and his summer home. He now earned his income mostly by readings and lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker and other magazines.
During his last years, his conversation became repetitive, to the disappointment of friends who had known him earlier as a witty and wide-ranging conversationalist. In 1972, he moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage, but he continued to summer in Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973 and was buried in Kirchstetten.
Work
See also: Bibliography of W. H. Auden
Overview
Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to 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 the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.
He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy... than any sexual relations I have had".
Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views that he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective. His rejected poems include "Spain" and "September 1, 1939". His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Auden's ___Select___ed Poems that Auden's practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it. (___Select___ed Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and early texts of poems that he revised.)
Early work, 1922-1939
Cover of the privately-printed Poems (1928)
Through 1930
Auden began writing poems at thirteen, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas Hardy. At eighteen he discovered T. S. Eliot and adopted an extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his own voice at twenty, when he wrote the first poem later included in his collected work, "From the very first coming down". This and other poems of the late 1920s tended to be in a clipped, elusive style that alluded to, but did not directly state, their themes of loneliness and loss. Twenty of these poems appeared in his first book Poems (1928), a pamphlet hand-printed by Stephen Spender.
In 1928 he wrote his first dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides, subtitled "A Charade," which combined style and content from the Icelandic sagas with jokes from English school life. This mixture of tragedy and farce, with a dream play-within-the-play, introduced the mixed styles and content of much of his later work. This drama and thirty short poems appeared in his first published book Poems (1930, 2nd edition with seven poems replaced, 1933); the poems in the book were mostly lyrical and gnomic mediations on hoped-for or unconsummated love and on themes of personal, social, and seasonal renewal; among these poems were "It was Easter as I walked," "Doom is dark," "Sir, no man's enemy," and "This lunar beauty."
A recurrent theme in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts", Auden's term for the powerful, unseen psychological effects of preceding generations on any individual life (and the title of a poem). A parallel theme, present throughout his work, is the contrast between biological evolution (unchosen and involuntary) and the psychological evolution of cultures and individuals (voluntary and deliberate even in its subconscious aspects).
1931 through 1935
Auden's next large-scale work was The Orators: An English Study (1932; revised editions, 1934, 1966), in verse and prose, largely about hero-worship in personal and political life. In his shorter poems, his style became more open and accessible, and the exuberant "Six Odes" in The Orators reflect his new interest in Robert Burns. During the next few years, many of his poems took their form and style from traditional ballads and popular songs, and also from expansive classical forms like the Odes of Horace, which he seems to have discovered through the German poet Hölderlin. Around this time his main influences were Dante, William Langland, and Alexander Pope.
Programme of a Group Theatre production of The Dance of Death, with unsigned synopsis by AudenDuring these years, much of his work expressed left-wing views, and he became widely known as a political poet, although his work was more politically ambivalent than many reviewers recognized. He generally wrote about revolutionary change in terms of a "change of heart", a transformation of a society from a closed-off psychology of fear to an open psychology of love. His verse drama The Dance of Death (1933) was a political extravaganza in the style of a theatrical revue, which Auden later called "a nihilistic leg-pull". His next play The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), written in collaboration with Isherwood, was similarly a quasi-Marxist updating of Gilbert and Sullivan in which the general idea of social transformation was more prominent than any specific political action or structure.
The Ascent of F6 (1937), another play written with Isherwood, was partly an anti-imperialist satire, partly (in the character of the self-destroying climber Michael Ransom) an examination of Auden's own motives in taking on a public role as a political poet. This play included the first version of "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), written as a satiric eulogy for a politician; Auden later rewrote the poem as a "Cabaret Song" about lost love (written to be sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson for whom he wrote many lyrics in the 1930s). In 1935, he worked briefly on documentary films with the G.P.O. Film Unit, writing his famous verse commentary for Night Mail and lyrics for other films that were among his attempts in the 1930s to create a widely-accessible, socially-conscious art.
1936 through 1939
These tendencies in style and content culminate in his collection Look, Stranger! (1936; his British publisher chose the title, which Auden hated; Auden retitled the 1937 US edition On This Island). This book included political odes, love poems, comic songs, meditative lyrics, and a variety of intellectually intense but emotionally accessible verse. Among the poems included in the book, connected by themes of personal, social, and evolutionary change and of the possibilities and problems of personal love, were "Hearing of harvests", "Out on the lawn I lie in bed", "O what is that sound", "Look, stranger, on this island now" (later revised versions change "on" to "at"), and "Our hunting fathers." Auden was now arguing that an artist should be a kind of journalist, and he put this view into practice in Letters from Iceland (1937) a travel book in prose and verse written with Louis MacNeice, which included his long social, literary, and autobiographical commentary "Letter to Lord Byron". In 1937, after observing the Spanish Civil War he wrote a politically-engaged pamphlet poem Spain (1937); he later discarded it from his collected works. Journey to a War (1939) a travel book in prose and verse, was written with Isherwood after their visit to the Sino-Japanese War. Auden's last collaboration with Isherwood was their third play, On the Frontier, an anti-war satire written in Broadway and West End styles.
Auden's themes in his shorter poems now included the fragility and transience of personal love ("Danse Macabre", "The Dream", "Lay your sleeping head"), a theme he treated with ironic wit in his "Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson" (which included "O Tell Me the Truth About Love" and the revised version of "Funeral Blues"), and also the corrupting effect of public and official culture on individual lives ("Casino", "School Children", "Dover"). In 1938 he wrote a series of dark, ironic ballads about individual failure ("Miss Gee", "James Honeyman", "Victor"). All these appeared in his next book of verse, Another Time (1940), together with other famous poems such as "Dover", "As He Is", and "Musée des Beaux Arts" (all written before he moved to America in 1939), and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "The Unknown Citizen", "Law Like Love", "September 1, 1939", and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (written in America). The elegies for Yeats and Freud are partly statements of Auden's anti-heroic theme, in which great deeds are performed, not by unique geniuses whom others cannot hope to imitate, but by otherwise ordinary individuals who were "silly like us" (Yeats) or of whom it could be said "he wasn't clever at all" (Freud), and who became teachers of others, not awe-inspiring heroes.
Middle period, 1940-1957
1940 through 1946
In 1940 Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year Letter", which appeared with miscellaneous notes and other poems in The Double Man (1941). At the time of his return to the Anglican Communion he began writing abstract verse on theological themes, such as "Canzone" and "Kairos and Logos". Around 1942, as he became more comfortable with religious themes, his verse became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly used the syllabic verse he learned from the poetry of Marianne Moore.
His recurring themes in this period included the artist's temptation to use other persons as material for his art rather than valuing them for themselves ("Prospero to Ariel") and the corresponding moral obligation to make and keep commitments while recognizing the temptation to break them ("In Sickness and Health"). From 1942 through 1947 he worked mostly on three long poems in dramatic form, each differing from the others in form 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 1947). The first two, with Auden's other new poems from 1940-44, were included in his first collected edition, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), with most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions.
1947 through 1957
After completing The Age of Anxiety in 1946 he focused again on shorter poems, notably "A Walk After Dark," "The Love Feast", and "The Fall of Rome." Many of these evoked the Italian village where he summered in 1948-57, and his next book, Nones (1951), had a Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work. A new theme was the "sacred importance" of the human body in its ordinary aspect (breathing, sleeping, eating) and the continuity with nature that the body made possible (in contrast to the division between humanity and nature that he had emphasized in the 1930s); his poems on these themes included "In Praise of Limestone" and "Memorial for the City". In 1949 Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, and later collaborated on two libretti for operas by Hans Werner Henze.
Auden's first separate prose book was The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1950), based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature. Between 1949 and 1954 he worked on a sequence of seven Good Friday poems, "Horae Canonicae", an encyclopedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history, focused on the irreversible act of murder; the poem was also a study in cyclical and linear ideas of time. While writing this, he also wrote a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to nature, "Bucolics". Both sequences appeared in his next book, The Shield of Achilles (1955), with other short poems, including the book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier".
Extending the themes of "Horae Canonicae", in 1955–56 he wrote a group of poems about "history," a word he used to mean the set of unique events made by human choices, as opposed to "nature," the set of involuntary events created by natural processes, statistics, and anonymous forces such as crowds. These poems included "T the Great", "The Maker", and the title poem of his next collection Homage to Clio (1960).
Later work, 1958-1973
In the late 1950s Auden's style became less rhetorical while its range of styles increased. In 1958, having moved his summer home 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 about the relation between love and personal and poetic language, and the contrasting "Dame Kind", about the anonymous impersonal reproductive instinct. These and other poems, including his 1955-66 poems about history, appeared in Homage to Clio (1960).
His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956-61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s.
While translating the haiku and other verse in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings, Auden began using haiku for many of his poems. A sequence of fifteen poems about his house in Austria, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat", appeared in About the House (1965), with other poems that included his reflections on his lecture tours, "On the Circuit". In the late 1960s he wrote some of his most vigorous poems, including "River Profile" and two poems that looked back over his life, "Prologue at Sixty" and "Forty Years On". All these appeared in City Without Walls (1969). His lifelong passion for Icelandic legend culminated in his verse translation of The Elder Edda (1969).
He was commissioned in 1963 to write lyrics for the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, but the producer rejected them as insufficiently romantic. A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) was a kind of self-portrait made up of favorite quotations with commentary, arranged in alphabetical order by subject. His last prose book was a ___select___ion of essays and reviews, Forewords and Afterwords (1973).
His last books of verse, Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the unfinished Thank You, Fog (1974) include reflective poems about language ("Natural Linguistics") and about his own aging ("A New Year Greeting", "Talking to Myself", "A Lullaby" ["The din of work is subdued"]). His last completed poem, in haiku form, was "Archeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later years.
Reputation and influence
Auden’s stature in modern literature has been disputed, with opinions ranging from that of Hugh MacDiarmid, who called him "a complete wash-out", to the obituarist in the Times (London), who wrote: "W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry... emerges as its undisputed master".
In his enfant terrible stage in the 1930s he was both praised and dismissed as a progressive and accessible voice, in contrast to the politically nostalgic and poetically obscure voice of T. S. Eliot. His departure for America in 1939 was hotly debated in Britain (once even in Parliament), with some critics treating it as a betrayal, and the role of influential young poet passed to Dylan Thomas, although defenders such as Geoffrey Grigson, in an introduction to a 1949 anthology of modern poetry, wrote that Auden "arches over all". His stature was suggested by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes (1972).
In the US, starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden’s regular stanzas set the style for a whole generation of poets; John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s Auden "was the modern poet". His manner was so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Beat Generation was partly a reaction against his influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, some writers (notably Philip Larkin and Randall Jarrell) lamented that Auden’s work had declined from its earlier promise.
By the time of Auden’s death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman. The Encyclopaedia 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". With some exceptions, British critics tended to treat his early work as his best, while American critics tended to favor his middle and later work. Unlike other modern poets, his reputation did not decline after his death, and Joseph Brodsky wrote that his was "the greatest mind of the twentieth century".
Auden’s popularity and familiarity suddenly increased after his "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") was read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994); subsequently, a pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold more than 275,000 copies. After September 11, 2001, his poem "September 1, 1939" was widely circulated and frequently broadcast. Public readings and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in 2007 marked his centenary year.
Published works
The following list includes only the books of poems and essays that Auden prepared during his lifetime; for a more complete list, including other works and posthumous editions, see Bibliography of W. H. Auden.
In the list below, works reprinted in the Complete Works of W. H. Auden are indicated by footnote references.
Books
Poems (London, 1930; second edn., seven poems substituted, London, 1933; includes poems and Paid on Both Sides: A Charade) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood).
The Orators: An English Study (London, 1932, verse and prose; slightly revised edn., London, 1934; revised edn. with new preface, London, 1966; New York 1967) (dedicated to Stephen Spender).
The Dance of Death (London, 1933, play) (dedicated to Robert Medley and Rupert Doone).
Poems (New York, 1934; contains Poems [1933 edition], The Orators [1932 edition], and The Dance of Death).
The Dog Beneath the Skin (London, New York, 1935; play, with Christopher Isherwood) (dedicated to Robert Moody).
The Ascent of F6 (London, 1936; 2nd edn., 1937; New York, 1937; play, with Christopher Isherwood) (dedicated to John Bicknell Auden).
Look, Stranger! (London, 1936, poems; US edn., On This Island, New York, 1937) (dedicated to Erika Mann)
Letters from Iceland (London, New York, 1937; verse and prose, with Louis MacNeice) (dedicated to George Augustus Auden).
On the Frontier (London, 1938; New York 1939; play, with Christopher Isherwood) (dedicated to Benjamin Britten).
Journey to a War (London, New York, 1939; verse and prose, with Christopher Isherwood) (dedicated to E. M. Forster).
Another Time (London, New York 1940; poetry) (dedicated to Chester Kallman).
The Double Man (New York, 1941, poems; UK edn., New Year Letter, London, 1941) (Dedicated to Elizabeth Mayer).
For the Time Being (New York, 1944; London, 1945; two long poems: "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest", dedicated to James and Tania Stern, and "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", in memoriam Constance Rosalie Auden [Auden's mother]).
The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York, 1945; includes new poems) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (New York, 1947; London, 1948; verse; won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) (dedicated to John Betjeman).
Collected Shorter Poems, 1930-1944 (London, 1950; similar to 1945 Collected Poetry) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
The Enchafèd Flood (New York, 1950; London, 1951; prose) (dedicated to Alan Ansen).
Nones (New York, 1951; London, 1952; poems) (dedicated to Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr)
The Shield of Achilles (New York, London, 1955; poems; won the 1956 National Book Award for Poetry) (dedicated to Lincoln and Fidelma Kirstein).
Homage to Clio (New York, London, 1960; poems) (dedicated to E. R. and A. E. Dodds).
The Dyer's Hand (New York, 1962; London, 1963; essays) (dedicated to Nevill Coghill).
About the House (New York, London, 1965; poems) (dedicated to Edmund and Elena Wilson).
Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (London, 1966; New York, 1967) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman).
Collected Longer Poems (London, 1968; New York, 1969).
Secondary Worlds (London, New York, 1969; prose) (dedicated to Valerie Eliot).
City Without Walls and Other Poems (London, New York, 1969) (dedicated to Peter Heyworth).
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (New York, London, 1970; quotations with commentary) (dedicated to Geoffrey Gorer).
Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems (London, New York, 1972) (dedicated to Orlan Fox).
Forewords and Afterwords (New York, London, 1973; essays) (dedicated to Hannah Arendt).
Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (London, New York, 1974) (dedicated to Michael and Marny Yates).
Film scripts and opera libretti
Night Mail (1936, documentary film narrative, not published separately except as a program note).
Paul Bunyan (1941, libretto for operetta by Benjamin Britten; not published until 1976).
The Rake's Progress (1951, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Igor Stravinsky).
Elegy for Young Lovers (1961, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Hans Werner Henze).
The Bassarids (1961, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Hans Werner Henze based on The Bacchae of Euripides).
Love's Labour's Lost (1973, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Nicolas Nabokov, based on Shakespeare's play).
Notes
^ The first syllable of "Auden" rhymes with "law" (not with "how").
^ a b c d Smith, Stan, ed. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82962-3.
^ Academy of American Poets. W. H. Auden. Retrieved on 2007-01-21.
^ a b Brodksy, Joseph (1986). Less Than One: ___select___ed essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 357. ISBN 0-374-18503-4.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Fuller, John (1998). W. H. Auden: a commentary. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19268-8.
^ The name Wystan originates from the ninth century St Wystan, a grandson of King Wiglaf of Mercia, who may have ruled Mercia himself briefly in 839-840. St Wystan was murdered by Beorhtwulf, king of Mercia 840-852. He was buried at Repton, Derbyshire, where a cult grew up. Auden's father, George Augustus Auden, was educated at Repton School, where the parish church is called St Wystan's (Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography, 1981).
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Carpenter, Humphrey (1981). W. H. Auden: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-049-28044-9.
^ a b c Davenport-Hines, Richard (1995). Auden. London: Heinemann. ISBN 0-434-17507-2.
^ a b c d e f g Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Auden, Wystan Hugh (Subscription access only). Retrieved on 2007-01-21.
^ In "Letter to Lord Byron" he names the saga character Auðun Skökull as one of his ancestors.
^ Auden, W. H. (1970). A Certain World. New York: Viking, p. 423. ISBN 0-670-20994-5.
^ Auden, W. H; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1995). In Solitude, For Company: W. H. Auden after 1940, unpublished prose and recent criticism (Auden Studies 3). Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 193. ISBN 0-19-818294-5.
^ Auden, W. H. (1993). The Prolific and the Devourer. New York: Ecco, p. 10. ISBN 0-88001-345-1.
^ Auden, W. H. (1973). Forewords and Afterwords. New York: Random House, p. 517. ISBN 0-394-48359-6.
^ Wright, Hugh, Auden and Gresham's in Conference Common Room, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer 2007 online at schoolsearch.co.uk (accessed 25 April 2008)
^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell (1994). Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03415-X.
^ Davenport-Hines, Richard (1995). Auden. London: Heinemann, ch. 3. ISBN 0-434-17507-2.
^ Auden, W. H. (1973). Forewords and Afterwords. New York: Random House, p. 69. ISBN 0-394-48359-6.
^ Mendelson, Edward (1999). Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 35. ISBN 0-374-18408-9.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Mendelson, Edward (1981). Early Auden. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-28712-1.
^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1996). Prose and travel books in prose and verse, Volume I: 1926-1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 138. ISBN 0-691-06803-8.
^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1995). In Solitude, For Company: W. H. Auden after 1940, unpublished prose and recent criticism (Auden Studies 3). Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 88. ISBN 0-19-818294-5.
^ Lissner, Will. "Poet and Judge Assist a Samaritan." New York Times, 2 March 1956, pp. 1, 39.
^ Mendelson, Edward (1999). Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 46. ISBN 0-374-18408-9.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Mendelson, Edward (1999). Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-18408-9.
^ Tippins, Sherrill (2005). February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-41911-X.
^ Pike, James A., ed., (1956). Modern Canterbury Pilgrims. New York: Morehouse-Gorham, p. 42.
^ a b Kirsch, Arthur (2005). Auden and Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10814-1.
^ BBC report on release of MI5 file on Auden.
^ Mendelson, Edward. Clouseau Investigates Auden.
^ Clark, Thekla (1995). Wystan and Chester: a personal memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17591-0.
^ Davenport-Hines, Richard (1995). Auden. London: Heinemann, p. 137. ISBN 0-434-17507-2.
^ Auden, W. H. (1966). Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957. London: Faber and Faber, p. 15. ISBN 0-571-06878-2.
^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1979). ___Select___ed Poems, new edition. New York: Vintage Books, pp. xix-xx. ISBN 0-394-72506-9.
^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell (1994). Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03415-X.
^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (2002). Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 92. ISBN 0-691-08935-3.
^ Auden, W. H. and Christopher Isherwood; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1988). Plays and other dramatic writings by W. H. Auden, 1928-1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. xxi. ISBN 0-691-06740-6.
^ a b c d e f g h Auden, W. H. and Christopher Isherwood; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1988). Plays and other dramatic writings by W. H. Auden, 1928-1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-06740-6.
^ a b c d Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1996). Prose and travel books in prose and verse, Volume I: 1926-1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-06803-8.
^ Auden, W. H. (1973). Forewords and Afterwords. New York: Random House, p. 68. ISBN 0-394-48359-6.
^ a b c d e f g Auden, W. H. and Chester Kallman; ed. by Edward Mendelson (1993). Libretti and other dramatic writings by W. H. Auden, 1939-1973. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03301-3.
^ Auden, W. H.; ed. by Edward Mendelson (2002). Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08935-3.
^ a b c d Sansom, Ian (2004). "Auden and Influence", in Stan Smith: The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 226-39. ISBN 0-521-82962-3.
^ Haffenden, John (1983). W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-9350-0.
^ Encyclopaedia Britannica Article: W. H. Auden. Retrieved on 2008-02-23.
^ The W. H. Auden Society. The Auden Centenary 2007. Retrieved on 2007-01-20.
References
See also: Category:Poetry by W. H. Auden, Category:Books by W. H. Auden, Category:W. H. Auden plays, and Category:Libretti by W. H. Auden
Printed sources
See also the listings on the criticism page at the W. H. Auden Society web site. In the list below, unless noted, publication data and ISBN refer to the first editions; many titles are also available in later reprints.
Bibliography
Bloomfield, B. C., and Edward Mendelson (1972). W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924-1969. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-0395-5. See post-1969 supplements in Auden Studies series listed below.
General biographical and critical studies
Carpenter, Humphrey (1981). W. H. Auden: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-049-28044-9.
Clark, Thekla, Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17591-0.
Davenport-Hines, Richard (1996). Auden. London: Heinemann. ISBN 0-434-17507-2.
Farnan, Dorothy J. (1984). Auden in Love. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-50418-5.
Fuller, John (1998). W. H. Auden: A Commentary. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19268-8.
Mendelson, Edward (1981). Early Auden. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-28712-1.
Mendelson, Edward (1999). Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-18408-9.
Smith, Stan, ed. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82962-3.
Spears, Monroe K. (1963). The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island. New York: Oxford University Press.
Spender, Stephen, ed. (1975). W. H. Auden: A Tribute. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-76884-0.
Wright, George T. (1969; rev. ed. 1981). W. H. Auden. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-7346-0.
Special topics
Haffenden, John, ed. (1983). W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-710-09350-0. ___Select___ed reviews of Auden's books and plays.
Kirsch, Arthur (2005). Auden and Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10814-1.
Mitchell, Donald (1981), Britten and Auden in the Thirties: the year 1936. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-11715-5.
Myers, Alan, and Robert Forsythe (1999), W. H. Auden: Pennine Poet. Nenthead: North Pennines Heritage Trust. ISBN 0-9513535-78. Pamphlet with map and gazetteer.
Auden Studies series
Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1990) "The Map of All My Youth": early works, friends and influences (Auden Studies 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-812964-5.
Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1994). "The Language of Learning and the Language of Love": uncollected writings, new interpretations (Auden Studies 2). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-812257-8.
Auden, W. H.; ed. by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (1995). "In Solitude, For Company": W. H. Auden after 1940: unpublished prose and recent criticism (Auden Studies 3). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-818294-5.