W. H. Auden, one of the very greatest twenteth-century English poets, was born in York in 1907. His father George was a doctor, who would become School Medical Officer and Professor of Public Health in Birmingham. His mother Constance was a nurse, musical and religious in a High Church fashion that left its mark on later Auden's self-ironizing love of verbal and intellectual display (“Mother wouldn't like it”, he would say in middle age); when he was eight, she taught him the words and music of the great love-potion scene in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, so that they could sing the duet (Auden was Isolde). After school at St Edmund's, Hindhead, Surrey (1915-20) where he met Christopher Isherwood, and Gresham's School, Holt, …
Citation: O'Neill, Michael. "W. H. Auden". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 July 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5107, accessed 03 March 2021.]
Articles on Auden's Works
- A Bride in the 30's
- A Summer Night
- Another Time
- As I Walked Out One Evening
- Casino
- Consider this and in our time
- Fish in the unruffled lakes
- Funeral Blues
- In Memory of W B Yeats
- In Praise of Limestone
- Lay your sleeping head, my love
- Letter to Lord Byron
- Look, stranger, at this island now
- Look, Stranger!
- May with its light behaving
- Musée des Beaux Arts
- Night Mail
- Nones
- O What Is That Sound
- Poems
- September I, 1939
- Spain
- The Collected Poetry
- The Orators