Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after .
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; .
He knew human folly like the back of his hand, .
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; .
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, .
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
W.H. Auden.
- Epitaph on a Tyrant.
Wystan Hugh Auden, an English-born American writer, was one of the most important poets of the 20th century. His works were not only influential at the time of writing, but also touch on such complex social and personal issues as to be relevant to any time period. While taking elements of other contemporary poets, Auden's poetry, portraying a deep understanding of the human psyche and of the world at large, exemplifies a distinct style which Auden himself cultivated.
W.H. Auden was born in York, the son of a physician. At first interested in science, he soon turned to poetry. In 1925 he entered Christ Church College, University of Oxford, where he became the center of a group of young leftist writers who generally expressed a socialist viewpoint, while continuing the artistic revolution of such earlier writers as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. This group included the poets Louis MacNiece and Stephen Spender and the novelist Christopher Isherwood. After graduating in 1928, he spent five years as a schoolmaster in Scotland and England. (Brophy 4).
Auden's earliest works are startling in several ways. They contain unusual meters, words, and images, juxtapose industrial and natural landscapes, and mix the rhythms of poetry with those of jazz music. Some critics feel that Auden's first books, Poems (1930) and The Orators, an English Study (1932), contain some of his finest work. (Callan 43) Poems focused on the breakdown of English capitalist society but also showed a deep concern with psychological problems. He subsequently wrote three verse plays with Isherwood: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F-6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938).
Modern Man - The Unknown Citizen The English-born American writer Wystan Hugh Auden was one of the most important poets of the 20th century. ... I felt the time period reflected W.H. ... In the time period that he wrote this poem in the late 1930's America was going through tremendous changes. This is the period in history in which The Great Depression was in effect. ... I felt the time period reflected W.H. ...
I stopped in front of a beautiful, historic townhouse that read ' the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House". ... The hall was filled with people chatting away; white clean walls surrounded me, as if they had just been newly painted. 24 striking black and white portraits were displayed throughout the house, capturing artists such as John Ashbury, W.H Auden and Phillip Roth to name a few. ... As she progressed, she referred to the fans of "Madmen and game of thrones" in the room before reciting her first poem about popular culture: " the Draper and the Jewess" ...
Eliot and W.H. Auden will probably still be read in a hundred years' time. ... As such, it relates closely to Impressionism in the visual arts, and shares many structural features with the new medium of the cinema, which reached great heights of achievement and influence in the first decades of the twentieth century. ... In 1899, Arthur Symons, one of the poetic 'aesthetes' of the 1890s, published his study The Symbolist Movement in Poetry, which would have great influence on modern poets like W.B. ... Yeats himself quickly drew the lesson that 'We must purify poetry...
