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.

While the teachings of Marx and Freud weighed heavily in his early work, they later gave way to religious and spiritual influences. While at Oxford, Auden became familiar with modernist poetry, particularly that of T.S. Eliot. It was also at Oxford that Auden became the pivotal member of a group of writers called the “Oxford Group” or the “Auden Generation,” which included Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. The group adhered to various Marxist and anti-fascist doctrines and addressed social, political, and economic concerns in their writings.

Auden’s poems from the second half of the 1930s evidence his many travels during this period of political turmoil. “Spain,” one of his most famous and widely anthologized pieces, is based on his experiences in that country during its civil war of 1936 to 1939.

Journey to War, a book of the period written by Auden with Christopher Isherwood, features Auden’s sonnet sequence and verse commentary, “In Time of War.” The first half of the sequence recounts the history of humanity’s move away from rational thought, while the second half addresses the moral problems faced by humankind on the verge of another world war. I

It was Auden who characterized the 30s as “the age of anxiety.” His 1947 poem by that title, wrote Monroe K. Spears in his Poetry of W.H.

Auden  was a rarity in the 20th century for being both witty and profound. He said, “A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.” He also said, “Real poetry originates in the guts and only flowers in the head. But one is always trying to reverse the process . . . .”

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