Auden probably fell in love with Isherwood and in the 1930s they maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others. He was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925 for the next few years Isherwood was his literary mentor to whom he sent poems for comments and criticism. Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a 3rd-class degree. Friends he met at Oxford included Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender these 4 were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the " Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. In 1925 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology, but he switched to English by his second year. Īuden later wrote a chapter on Gresham's for Graham Greene's The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (1934). His first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923. In school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922, and Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his last year at Gresham's.
Soon after, he "discover(ed) that he (had) lost his faith" (through a gradual realisation that he had lost interest in religion, not through any decisive change of views). At 13 he went to Gresham's School inNorfolk there, in 1922, when his friend Robert Medley asked him if he wrote poetry, Auden 1st realized his vocation was to be a poet. Edmund's School, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, later famous in his own right as a novelist. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do." Education Īuden's first boarding school was St. His visits to the Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining industry figure in many of his poems the remote decaying mining village of Rookhope was for him a "sacred landscape", evoked in a late poem, "Amor Loci." Until he was 15 he expected to become a mining engineer, but his passion for words had already begun. From the age of 8 he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays. In 1908 his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas is visible throughout his work. He traced his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood. He was the 3rd of 3 children, all sons the eldest, George Bernard Auden, became a farmer, while the 2nd, John Bicknell Auden, became a geologist.Īuden's grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen he grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household which followed a "High" form of Anglicanism with doctrine and ritual resembling those of Roman Catholicism. Auden in His Own Words Childhood Īuden was born in York, England, to George Augustus Auden, a physician, and Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden, who had trained (but never served) as a missionary nurse. He was also partly responsible for re-introducing Anglo-Saxon Accentual verse to English poetry. Auden's work is characterized by exceptional variety, ranging from such rigorous traditional forms as the villanelle to entirely unstructured verse, as well as the technical and verbal skills Auden displayed regardless of form. 1.5 United States and Europe, 1939-1973Īuden wrote a considerable body of literary criticism and essays, as well as co-authoring some drama with his friend Christopher Isherwood, but he is primarily known as a poet.
0 kommentar(er)
