Month: September 2010

Quote of the week, September 6, 2010

We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.

—W. H. Auden 1907- 1973

Prolific Oxford educated poet and essayist who wrote on political, religious and moral themes. Later a naturalized American citizen, he was controversial for his liberal theology and his relationship with Christopher Isherwood.

Greg Bover

From Wikipedia-

W.H. Auden

From the Library of Congress

Born
February 21, 1907(1907-02-21)
York, England

Died
29 September 1973 (aged 66)
Vienna, Austria

Nationality
British from birth; American from 1946

Ethnicity
English

Education
M.A. English language and literature

Alma mater
Christ Church, Oxford

Occupation
Poet

Relatives
George Augustus Auden (father), Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden (mother), George Bernard Auden (brother), John Bicknell Auden (brother)

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973, pronounced /ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/)^[1] who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,^[2][3] born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.^[4] His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content.^[5][6] The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.^[7]

He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") and "September 1, 1939", became widely known through films, broadcasts and popular media.^[4]