Facts about W.H. Auden
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Auden's libretto for Benjamin Britten's 1951 opera Billy Budd marked a significant collaboration between two major twentieth-century artists in the English-speaking world.
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Auden's final home was a modest Austrian cottage in Kirchstetten, where he lived from 1957 until his death in 1973, writing prolifically during those sixteen years.
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Auden's deliberate revision of his 1939 poem September 1, 1939 removed the line "We must love one another or die" because he felt it was dishonest propaganda.
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Auden's 1940 essay Christianity and the Social Order became influential in postwar Anglican theology, shaping religious thought decades after its publication.
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Auden's 1937 journey to Spain during the Civil War inspired his poem Spain, which he later disowned and refused to republish for decades due to changing political views.
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Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Auden taught at American universities including Bennington College and the University of Michigan, supplementing his income as a freelance writer and editor.
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Twenty-one-year-old Auden published his debut collection Poems in 1930, which immediately established him as a leading voice of 1930s British literary modernism.
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Auden wrote approximately 400 poems across his lifetime, with his collected works spanning over 600 pages when published in 1976.
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Auden's poem The Age of Anxiety won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948, three years after his American citizenship was granted.
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In 1939, W.H. Auden emigrated from England to the United States at age 32, becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1946.