18 Dec WH Auden
WH Auden was one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. He’s probably best known for The Age of Anxiety (1947), a long poem about the struggle to find meaning in an industrialized world. Auden’s popularity has increased in recent years, as evidenced by the publication of numerous posthumous collections of his poems and prose. It was boosted further when his poem Funeral Blues (1938) was read aloud during the funeral service in the popular film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994): “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”.
Auden was born in York in 1907. His first collection of poems, Poems (1930), caught the literary world’s attention. He moved to the United States in 1939 and became a US citizen in 1946. However, from 1948 he preferred to spend the summers in Europe. Then in 1972 he set up his winter home in Oxford, while continuing to spend the summers at his farmhouse in Kirchstetten, Austria. He died suddenly in Vienna in 1973 at the age of 66 and is buried in Kirchstetten. There’s a memorial stone in Poets’ Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey.