Shaun Thomas We celebrate the life and death of a historic York resident this month as it is the 105th birthday of the poet Wystan Hugh Auden on the 21st. Auden, whom penned poems such as Funeral Blues and If I Could Tell You, was born in York in 1907 and was famous for being both a witty and exceptionally talented technical writer. Auden went on to visit Spain during the Civil war in 1937 and immigrated to America on the eve of the Second World War, finally resting in his home in Austria in 1973.
As a young man, Auden attended Oxford and met Christopher Isherwood, a man he would collaborate with on a number of projects over the course of his life. Auden graduated late in the 1920’s and went to live in Berlin for a year. He promptly returned, however, to become a teacher. A capacity he would keep for most of his life and take him to the position as Head of Poetry at his old university. A post he would keep for five long years.
Auden’s Post-Oxford days were far from ordinary. In 1935 for instance, he married a close friend Erika Mann. Erika was the daughter of the famous German novelist Thomas Mann, and would later go on to be a notable writer herself. Her marriage to Auden was not in the name of the love, but instead in the name of getting out of Nazi Germany as fast as possible. Auden did not mind the arrangement, he himself was a homosexual.
In 1939 Auden and Christopher Isherwood fled to the United States in, what is now regarded as an attempt to keep out of the nasty business of the Second World War. While in New York, Auden had the pleasure of meeting Chester Kallman, a poet whom would be his companion for the rest of his life. I’m sure Erika did not mind.
Auden would go on to take US citizenship in 1946 and teach around the country at numerous different universities. This was not all Auden got up to however. A year later in 1947 Auden went onto win the Pulitzer Prize for his set of poetry ‘The Age of Anxiety and build his reputation as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
You will be glad to hear that after a lifetime of moving from country to country and teaching Auden settled down back in Oxford in a cottage owned by his old college, Christ Church, and took regular trips to his home away from home in Austria where he eventually died. A place he had bought twenty years previously, for what can only be assumed as, somewhere for a rather good sit down.
