Auden, W. H.
Auden's first volume of poetry appeared in 1930. Later volumes include Spain (1937), New Year Letter (1941), For the Time Being, a Christmas Oratorio (1945), The Age of Anxiety (1947; Pulitzer Prize), Nones (1951), The Shield of Achilles (1955), Homage to Clio (1960), About the House (1965), Epistle of a Godson and Other Poems (1972), and Thank You, Fog (1974). His other works include Letters from Iceland (with Louis MacNeice, 1937); the libretto, with his companion Chester Kallman, for Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress (1953); A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970); and The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1968).
In 1939, Auden moved to the United States, he became a citizen in 1946, and beginning that year taught at a number of American colleges and universities. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford. Subsequently he lived in a number of countries, including Italy and Austria, and in 1971 he returned to England. He was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1967.
See his Collected Poetry (1945), Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 (1967), and Collected Longer Poems (1969); E. Mendelson, ed., The Complete Works of W. H. Auden (8 vol., 1997–); biographies by C. Osborne (1979, repr. 1995), H. Carpenter (1981), E. Mendelson (2 vol., 1981–99), and R. Davenport-Hines (1996) and Auden in Love (1984) by D. Farnan; studies by S. Hynes (1977, repr. 1982) and E. Callan (1983).
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