W. H. Auden

AUDEN, Wystan Hugh. b. York, 21 February 1907; d. Vienna, 29 September 1973. He spent much of his childhood at Birmingham, where his father was Schools’ Medical Officer. He was educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, Norfolk (a few years earlier than Benjamin Britten*, with whom he later worked) and Christ Church, Oxford (BA 1928). He was the leader of an outstanding group of young poets in the 1930s (Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis), and in the decades that followed he established himself as one of the major English poets of the 20th century. Although he went to America in 1939 and lived there during the war (which affected his reputation in Britain for some years), he spent...