Biography EssayW. H. Auden was a major English poet, probably the most important English-speaking poet born in the twentieth century. Noted especially for native lyrical gifts and highly developed tec...
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The English-born American poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) was one of the preeminent poets of the twentieth century. His works center on moral issues and evidence strong political, social, and psychologic...
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"America may break one completely, but the best of which one is capable is more likely to be drawn out of one here than anywhere else," W. H. Auden wrote a friend soon after immigrating to the United ...
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No English poet since the seventeenth century made a more promising approach to the theater than young Auden. That he did not develop as a playwright after 1938 may be attributed to the radical transf...
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W.H. Auden was a major English poet, probably the most important English-speaking poet born in the twentieth century. Noted especially for native lyrical gifts and highly developed technical expertise...
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In the following essay, Hynes discusses Auden's emigration to the United States, his preoccupation with history and art, and "New Year Letter" as a reflection of Auden's hi...
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In the following essay, McFarland examines the significance of Roman satiric verse and the conventions of the cena, a Roman banquet, in "Tonight at Seven-Thirty."
Among W. H. Auden...
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In the following essay, France examines Auden's historical perspective and juxtaposition of Latin and Gothic Christianity in his "In Praise of Limestone."
Critics of W. H. Auden&#...
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In the following essay, Deane explores Auden's theoretical assumptions, linguistic techniques, and open-ended relationship with the reader in "New Year Letter."
In October 1941, t...
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In the following essay, Held discusses the significance of Auden's appropriation of blues music convention in "Refugee Blues."
All art, Walter Pater declared, aspires to the condi...
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In the following essay, Jacobs examines Auden's communitarian sympathies and moral vision. According to Jacobs, "Auden understood both the costs and benefits of choosing to cultivate loc...
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In the following essay, Jenkins provides an overview of Auden's literary career and the significance of his expatriation in the United States.
No episode in the century's English-speakin...
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In the following essay, Berger examines the content, structure, and central themes of "In Time of War."
Auden's poetry of the thirties is suffused by a sense of diffuse crisis, or...
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In the following essay, Caserio discusses Auden's attitudes toward civic allegiance, the significance of his emigration to the United States, and the association of homosexuality with exile.
W....
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Critical Essay by Robert Bloom
The various characteristics that [Randall Jarrell in his essay "Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry," see CLC, Vol. 2] lists in order...
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Critical Essay by James D. Brophy
In a century of the symbolist, surreal, and absurd, W. H. Auden is essentially a poet of the reasonable. "Coming out of me living is always thinking," a...
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Critical Essay by Peter E. Firchow
The usual notion that the earliest Auden is apolitical, as voiced by Jarrell or Spender (e.g., in the famous remark that Auden "came to politics by way of psy...
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Critical Essay by David Perkins
Above all I was charmed in Auden by what to me, when I first read him, seemed the ultimate sophistication, which was not disillusion but instead minimal expectations. M...
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Critical Essay by David Lehman
Ever the schoolboy poet, whose mixed blessing it was to have authored juvenilia of such intellectual force and genius of craft that the best of his last writings must in...
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Critical Essay by Dr. Narsingh Srivastava
Symbolisation of landscape is one of the major structural patterns in the poetry of W. H. Auden. Aware as he has ever been of the inadequacy of the direct sta...
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Critical Essay by Timothy Green
In an essay-review of Loren Eiseley's The Unexpected Universe in 1970, W. H. Auden identifies genuine laughter with the "spirit of Carnival" and in...
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Critical Essay by Edward Callan
The first of Auden's longer works, Paid on Both Sides: A Charade,… is ostensibly an episode in a continuing feud between two families who live some fiftee...
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Critical Essay by Peter Porter
[We should not be tempted] either to believe Auden's own analysis of his creative character, or to divide his output too firmly into the "English" A...
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Critical Essay by Frank Kermode
Auden came close to a point where he no longer understood his own poetry…. [Something] happened that made him close his mind, not to the earliest poetry so much ...
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In If I Could Tell You, a villanelle poem, by W. H. Auden, time is introduced to the reader as an unreliable person. This characteristic of Time given by the speaker is embroidered in the poem through...
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Wystan Hugh Auden
W. H. Auden
W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
