W. H. Auden (1907 - 1973)

Auden was born 21 February 1907, 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 centre of a group of literary intellectuals that included Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis, And Louis MacNeice. After graduation he was schoolmaster in Scotland and England for five years.

In London, in the early 1930s, Auden belonged to a circle of promising young poets who were strongly leftist. His book Poems, which helped to establish his reputation, 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, The Ascent of F-6, and On the Frontier. In 1937 he drove an ambulance for the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war. In the same year he was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry, a major honour. Trips to Iceland and China - the first with MacNeice, the second with Isherwood - resulted in two jointly written books, Letter from Iceland, and Journey to a War.

In 1939 Auden moved to the US, where he became a citizen and was active as a poet, reviewer, lecturer and editor. His Double Man and For the Times Being reflect an increasing concern with religion, which, he discovered, offered a better solution to his problems than communism. The Age of Anxiety, a "baroque eclogue" that takes place in a New York City bar, won him the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and provided an apt and convenient name for his era. His numerous other works include Collected Poetry, the Shield of Achilles, Collected Longer Poems, and several opera librettos written with the American Chester Kallman. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford, and in 1972 he returned to Christ Church as a writer in residence. He died 28 September, 1973, in Vienna.

As a poet, Auden bore some resemblance to T.S. Eliot. Like him, he had a cool, ironic wit, yet was deeply religious. He was concerned to a greater degree than Eliot, however, with a social problems. Possessed of probing psychological insight, Auden also had a supremely lyric gift.

The poems are by default sorted according to volume, but you can also choose to sort them alphabetically or by page views.

First Line	Comments
Anthropos apteros for days
"The underground roads
(for Christopher Isherwood)
(for John and Teckla Clark)
(To JS/07/M/378/ This Marble Monument	23 Comments
A cloudless night like this
A REACTIONARY TRACT FOR THE TIMES
A shilling life will give you all the facts:
About suffering they were never wrong,	5 Comments
All are limitory, but each has her own
Almost happy now, he looked at his estate.	2 Comments
Among pelagian travelers,
And the age ended, and the last deliverer died.
As I walked out one evening,	33 Comments
As I walked out one evening,
At Dirty Dick's and Sloppy Joe's
At last the secret is out,
Base words are uttered only by the base
Being set on the idea
Certainly our city with its byres of poverty down to
Clocks cannot tell our time of day
Dear, though the night is gone,
Did you ever hear about Cocaine Lil?	20 Comments
Each lover has some theory of his own
Encased in talent like a uniform,	1 Comment
For us like any other fugitive,
For what as easy
Give me a doctor partridge-plump,
He looked in all His wisdom from the throne
I	6 Comments
I
I
I sit in one of the dives	2 Comments
I. Song of the Beggars
I. The Door
If all a top physicist knows
If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Lady, weeping at the crossroads
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Lay your sleeping head, my love,	3 Comments
Lay your sleeping head, my love,	5 Comments
Look, stranger, at this island now
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well	1 Comment
My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely,
Not as that dream Napoleon, rumour's dread and centre,
Now through night's caressing grip
O the valley in the summer where I and my John
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear
Over the heather the wet wind blows,
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
Say this city has ten million souls,
She looked over his shoulder	3 Comments
Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all	3 Comments
So an age ended, and its last deliverer died
Some say love's a little boy,
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,	29 Comments
Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings,	1 Comment
The Hidden Law does not deny	1 Comment
The Ogre does what ogres can,
The piers are pummelled by the waves;	2 Comments
They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden:
This lunar beauty
Time can say nothing but I told you so,
Time will say nothing but I told you so,	5 Comments
Time will say nothing but I told you so, /
Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,	2 Comments
Underneath the leaves of life,
Unrhymed, unrythmical, the chatter goes:
Victor was a little baby,
We made all possible preparations,
We, too, had known golden hours
When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
You are the town and we are the clock.
"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,