|
4. W. H. Auden (1907-1973) and Auden Group
Life
The Great Depression and
social upheaval has made the 1930s a “Red Decade”. The Auden Group in favor
of the Left in their protest against the fascism sprang up in the poetic
world of England, headed by W. H. Auden and flanked by two Irishmen, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day Lewis, and by Stephen Spender who once briefly joined
the British Communist Party and went to Spain on the Republican side in the
Civil War. The Auden Generation had studied together at Oxford and was
united in their protest against social evil and in their rejection of
middle- class. However, after the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939,
they lost their radical political enthusiasm and went their several ways.
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was the leader of this group. Auden was born
into an Anglican family in York, England in 1907, and educated at Oxford. In
1928, Auden’s first collection of poems was printed through a hand press by
Spender at Oxford. He also published a poem in Standard, which was
then edited by T. S. Eliot. His first public anthology, Poems, which
was published in 1930 by Eliot’s publishing company, soon established him as
a poet in English literary history. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in
1936, he went to Spain and served as an ambulance driver in the Republican
side. In 1930s, he was very active and radical and considered himself a
socialist due to the great influence of Marxism and Freud. He used to visit
Iceland and China and served in the Spanish Civil War.
In the 1930s, Auden’s poetic career reached its climax.
Successively, he published On This Island (1937), Spain 1967
and Journey to a War (written with Christopher Ishwood). Besides, he
also published three verse dramas, The Dog beneath the Skin or Where Is
Frontier (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936) and On the Frontier:
A Melodrama in Three Acts (1938). In 1939, he migrated to the U. S. A.,
where he met his lover, Chester Kallman. Since the late 1930s, Auden has
remained a poet of importance, but he went in the reverse direction of T. S.
Eliot and became more an American than a British poet. He joined American
nationality in 1946.
Auden’s own beliefs changed radically between his
youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of Socialism and
Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central
preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant
theologians. His later and more mature poems were collected in Another
Time (1940), New Year Letter (1941) and The Sea and the Mirror
(1946). After he was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize, Auden tended to be more
religious and pessimistic. The last works included Homage to Clio
(1960), About the House (1965), City Without Walls (1970) and
two collections of essays, The Dyer’s Hand, and Other Stories (1963)
and Secondary Worlds: The T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures (1968).
W. H. Auden was a Chancellor of
The Academy of American
Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life
between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.
|
