Biography

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in 1907 and educated at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk, and Christ Church, Oxford. After leaving Oxford he taught school from 1930 to 1935 and later worked for a government film unit. His sympathies in the 1930s were with the Left, like those of many intellectuals of his age, and he went to Spain during the Civil War, intending to serve as an ambulance driver on the left-wing Republican side. To his surprise, he found himself so disturbed by the sight of the many Roman Catholic churches gutted and looted by the Republicans that he returned to England without fulfilling his ambition. He traveled in Iceland and China before coming to America in 1939; in 1946 he became an American citizen. He taught at a number of American colleges and was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1960. He died in 1973.