What Happened to Wystan Auden?

1.

At the age of thirty-one, Wystan Hugh Auden, the major British poet between A.E. Housman and Philip Larkin (with a range of styles, techniques, forms, and themes far greater than either’s), left England to settle in New York until a year before his death. Other poets of the twentieth century had chosen life abroad, notably T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but they quit their native land early in their twenties at the beginning of their careers. When Auden went into a self-imposed exile in 1939, he had already achieved a firmly established and distinguished position as poet and essayist. His literary executor (and editor of the critical edition of his complete works) Edward Mendelson has remarked, “No English poet since Byron achieved fame as quickly as Auden did.” The new volume of the critical edition, Prose, Volume III, contains the prose writings from 1949 to 1955 that followed after Auden’s first ten years in America.

Continue reading
for just $1.00 per issue!

Choose a Digital subscription or our best deal – All Access – that includes print and digital issues, full archive access, and the NYR App!

View Offers

---

Or register for a free account to read just this article. Register.

Already a subscriber? Sign in

Continue reading for just $1 an issue and get a FREE notebook! Continue reading
for just $1 an issue.

Choose a Digital subscription or our best deal—All Access—and we will send you a free pocket notebook! Choose a Digital subscription or our best deal—All Access—that includes print and digital issues, full archive access, and the NYR App!

View Offers

---

Or register for a free account to read just this article. Register.

Already a subscriber? Sign in

Advertisement