In 1939, Auden fell in love with Chester Kallman and regarded their relationship as a marriage, but this ended in 1941 when Kallman refused to accept the faithful relations that Auden demanded. From 1956 to 1961 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford his lectures were popular with students and faculty, and served as the basis for his 1962 prose collection The Dyer's Hand.Īuden and Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual relationship from around 1927 to 1939, while both also had briefer but more intense relations with other men. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1947 long poem The Age of Anxiety, the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era. Auden moved to the United States partly to escape this reputation, and his work in the 1940s, including the long poems ' For the Time Being' and ' The Sea and the Mirror', focused on religious themes. Three plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood between 19 built his reputation as a left-wing political writer. He came to wide public attention with his first book Poems at the age of twenty-three in 1930 it was followed in 1932 by The Orators. From 1947 to 1957 he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia from 1958 until the end of his life he wintered in New York (in Oxford in 1972–73) and summered in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria. He taught from 1941 to 1945 in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s. In 1939, he moved to the United States and became an American citizen in 1946, retaining his British citizenship. After a few months in Berlin in 1928–29, he spent five years (1930–35) teaching in British private preparatory schools, then travelled to Iceland and China to write books about his journeys.

He attended various English independent (or public) schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. He was born in York and grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family. Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden (mother).

Auden age of anxiety pdf file