An English poet, who later became an American citizen. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content.
Auden was 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.
Epitaph on a Tyrant
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.
Above is one of Auden’s short masterpieces. In just six lines, he manages to say so much about the nature of tyranny. He lived in Berlin in the 1930’s and published the poem in 1939. The specific tyrant Auden had in mind, then, was probably Adolf Hitler, though the poem can be analyzed as a study in tyranny more generally, too.
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