WH Auden was born in York, the son of a doctor, and educated at Oxford University. While still an undergraduate, he became the centre of a group of left-wing intellectuals which included the poets Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice, and the novelist Christopher Isherwood. After graduating from Oxford University, Auden spent some time in pre-Nazi Berlin before returning to Britain to work as a schoolmaster.
Auden's first book, Poems, published in 1930, was an immediate success. Modernist in tone and technique, his work was more politically committed than that of the earlier generation, such as T S Eliot or Ezra Pound. It also revealed Auden's wide reading in anthropology and psychoanalysis. In 1932, another book of poetry was published, The Orators (1932), which was equally well received.
As the global political situation in the 1930s deteriorated, Auden stood out as an articulate figure of the left, with collections like Look, Stranger! (1936) and plays like The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), written in collaboration with Isherwood.
In 1935, he married Erika Mann to enable her to escape from Nazi Germany. In 1937, he went to Spain in support of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. A journey to war-torn China in 1938 with Isherwood was described in Journey to a War (1939), combining poetry with prose.
Auden and Isherwood returned from China via the United States and made a decision to settle there. Auden no longer believed his work could change social or political conditions, declaring that "poetry makes nothing happen". In January 1939, he moved definitively to the United States, met the man who was to become his lifelong companion, Chester Kallman, and entered a very productive period. The first book of his American years, Another Time (1940), contains some of what are considered his most beautiful poems. His work was now moving away from politics and towards religion in volumes such as New Year Letter (1941) and For the Time Being (1944) with its Christmas Oratorio. In 1948, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Anxiety was published, a long dramatic poem set in a New York bar.
