W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden grew up in Birmingham, the son of a doctor, and studied at Oxford, where he became the leading figure of a generation of young poets. He spent time in Weimar Berlin with his friend Christopher Isherwood and worked as a schoolteacher in England.

In the 1930s his political poems made him the voice of a generation. In 1935 he married Erika Mann, the daughter of Thomas Mann, so that she could obtain a British passport and escape Nazi Germany. In 1937 he went to Spain during the Civil War.

In 1939 he emigrated to the United States with Isherwood. There he met the young poet Chester Kallman, who became the great love of his life. Their relationship changed over the years, but they lived and worked together until Auden’s death; together they wrote the libretto of Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress”. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for “The Age of Anxiety”. His poem “Funeral Blues” (“Stop all the clocks”) became famous to a wide audience through the film “Four Weddings and a Funeral”.

He spent his summers in Kirchstetten in Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973, aged 66.