Auden

"It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money
writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it." 
-  W.H. Auden

W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. As a young man, he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford, he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

In 1928, Auden’s collection, Poems, was privately printed, but it was two years later when another collection (also titled Poems but with different poems) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.

Auden is admired for his technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form. He also included in his poems popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech.

The central focus of Auden's work switched from politics to religion when he moved to the United States in 1939. It was also in the U.S. that he met his lover Chester Kallman. While their sexual relationship only lasted two years, they remained friends and occasional housemates for the rest of their lives. 

The Shield of Achilles, which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H. Auden’s most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry.

In later years, Auden lived on a farm in Austria, teaching interstitially at Oxford and writing for The New Yorker and other magazines. He died in Vienna in 1973.

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

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