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, …

We have have no profile for this entry. If you are a qualified scholar and you wish to write for The Literary Encyclopedia, please click here to contact us.

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 22 September 2017.]

Articles on Auden's works

1. A Bride in the 30's
2. A Summer Night
3. As I Walked Out One Evening
4. Casino
5. Fish in the unruffled lakes
6. Lay your sleeping head, my love
7. Letter to Lord Byron
8. Look, stranger, at this island now
9. Look, Stranger!
10. May with its light behaving
11. Musée des Beaux Arts
12. Night Mail
13. O What Is That Sound
14. The Collected Poetry

Related Groups

1. Queer (GLBT) Literature
2. The Sonnet Tradition

• View recommended reading for this article