WH Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (born February 21, 1907 in York , † September 29, 1973 in Vienna ) was an English writer who took American citizenship in 1946.

Christopher Isherwood (left) and WH Auden (right) photographed by Carl van Vechten , February 6, 1939

Auden's grave at the Kirchstetten cemetery (Lower Austria)

Life

WH Auden was the son of a doctor and a nurse. Auden was best known as a poet - he wrote some poems at the age of 13. In addition, he wrote a large number of reviews and essays and, together with his friend Christopher Isherwood , whom he met at the age of 18, several dramas (two set to music by Benjamin Britten). For his major work, the verse dialogue The Age of Anxiety (The Age of Anxiety, 1947), he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 . In 1957 he was awarded the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize , in 1966 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature .

As a librettist he influenced important composers of his time. For Benjamin Britten , who, like Auden, had attended Gresham's School in Norfolk , he arranged the text for the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers . Together with his second partner Chester Kallman (1921–1975) he wrote libretti for Igor Stravinsky ( The Rake's Progress , German: Der Wüstling), for Hans Werner Henze ( The Bassarids and Elegy for Young Lovers ) and for Nicolas Nabokov (Love's Labor Lost ) . Leonard Bernstein used his poem The Age of Anxiety as inspiration for a symphony of the same name, without inserting the text directly.

The writer dealt with the political upheavals of his time and gave them expression, among other things, in the poems Spain (about the Spanish Civil War ) and September 1, 1939 (beginning of the Second World War ). Other significant works are his Christmas Oratorio For the Time Being and Poems on the Death by William Butler Yeats and Sigmund Freud .

His poems have been quoted in films, for example the funeral poem Funeral Blues in Four Weddings and a Death (1993) or a sonnet at a central point in Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (1974) by Luchino Visconti , or Letters from Iceland in An ihr Seite ( 2006).

In 1929, after completing his studies, he lived with Christopher Isherwood in Berlin during the Weimar period for nine months . In Germany he visited Kassel and Marburg and traveled to Iceland, about which he published a travel book. Auden sided with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and published some of his best-known poems on the fight against fascism . He also wrote about the Sino-Japanese War .

In 1935 Auden married Erika Mann , Thomas Mann's daughter , in order to help the writer, who had been expatriated from Nazi Germany , to obtain an English passport. In 1939 he moved to New York , where he initially taught. From 1942 to 1945 he worked at Swarthmore College in the state of Pennsylvania. In 1946 he took American citizenship. From 1948 to 1972 he spent the winters in the USA and the summers in Europe. Only in the last year of his life did he return to his homeland and settle in Oxford . Since 1948 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

After presenting himself as a politically radical poet , influenced by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, initially as the center of the Pylon Poets , founded in his early Oxford years , he later turned to Christianity. This turning point finds its best-known expression in the post-war verse epic The Age of Fear .

From 1956 to 1960 Auden was Professor of Poetry in Oxford ( Oxford Professor of Poetry ). Between 1957 and 1973 he mostly lived in Kirchstetten (Austria) during the summer months , where he was also buried. In 1995 a Wystan Hugh Auden memorial was set up in his house.

Works

Auden wrote over 400 poems and 400 essays, as well as plays and opera libretti. Poems

• The age of fear. A baroque shepherd's poem . Limes, Wiesbaden 1947. Foreword by Gottfried Benn . Translator: Kurt Heinrich Hansen, new edition 1985 by Heyne, ISBN 978-3453850101 .
• The hiker. Limes, Wiesbaden 1955. Translated by Astrid Claes and Edgar Lohner
• The common life. Bläschke, 1964. Translation: Dieter Leisegang
• The Cave of Making. Bläschke, 1965. Translation: Dieter Leisegang
• Poetry album No. 92. New Life Publishing House, 1975. Translations a. a. by Ernst Jandl , Astrid Claes, Hans Magnus Enzensberger .
• Poems - poems. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1976 (bilingual). Translated u. a. by Friederike Mayröcker , Hilde Spiel and Erich Fried , ISBN 3-423-05436-0 .
• Good luck with the day ahead. Volk & Welt, 1978 (bilingual). Afterword and remarks by Günter Gentsch.
• Poems - Kirchstettner Gedichte 1958-1973. Vienna 1983. Ed. Peter Müller u. Karlheinz Roschitz together with the Lower Austria Society for Art and Culture. Bilingual, translated by Johannes Wolfgang Paul. Octave.
• If I Could Part You. Postings by Hans Egon Holthusen , Kurt Hoffmann and Georg von der Vring , In: Ad libitum. Collection distraction. Volk & Welt, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3353000607 .
• The unknown citizen. Post-poetry: Herta F. Staub, ibid.
• Invocation of Ariel's Selected Poems (bilingual). Translator: Erich Fried. Piper, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-492-10842-3 , (Piper 842 series) .
• Here and now. A Christmas Oratorio. Piper, 1992. Translated by Gerhard Fritsch , ISBN 978-3492111683 .
• Tell me the truth about love Ten poems. Goldmann, Munich 1994 (bilingual), translator: Ernst Jandl u. a., ISBN 978-3442430314 .
• Stop all clocks. Poems. Pendo, 2002, ISBN 978-3858424266 .
• Love poems. Insel, 2008, ISBN 978-3458350460 .

Essays

• The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. Mohn, 1962. Compilation of prose and literary-analytical texts (including Shakespeare, DH Lawrence, Robert Frost)
• Shakespeare. Five essays. Insel 1964, Insel Library No. 811
• Words and notes. Speech at the opening of the Salzburg Festival 1968, Festungsverlag Salzburg
• It seemed to me. Baulino, 1984. Texts a. a. about Kierkegaard, Poe, van Gogh and Thomas Mann
• An awareness of reality. Piper, 1989 ISBN 978-3492107570
• From Shakespeare's world. Pendo, 2001. With an afterword and translated by Hanno Helbling ISBN 978-3858424167

Also an essay about the author in The Poor of London by Henry Mayhew

Dramas and opera libretti

• Paul Bunyan . Operetta. Prologue and 2 acts. Composer: Benjamin Britten; Libretto: Wystan Hugh Auden; German version: Erich Fried. Premiere May 5, 1941 in New York (Columbia University). New version (edited by C. Graham): June 4, 1976 Aldeburgh Festival
• The Rake's Progress (with Chester Kallman) , composer: Igor Stravinsky, UA Teatro La Fenice, Venice 1951
• Elegy for young lovers (together with Chester Kallman), composer: Hans Werner Henze. An opera in three acts. Schott, 1961, translated by Ludwig Landgraf
• The Dog Beneath the Skin (for the Group Theater)
• The Ascent of F6 (ditto)
• On the frontier (ditto)

In addition, the libretto for Hans Werner Henze's literary opera Die Bassariden von Auden, as well as the libretto for Henze's Moralities .

Around 1943/44, Auden and Bert Brecht wrote a new version of John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi .

literature

• Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973). His aesthetic approach to opera and his work as a librettist for Barbara Engelbert. Bosse, 1983. ISBN 978-3764922665 .
• Günther Jarfe: The young Auden. Poetic procedures and their meaning in W. H. Audens early work. Heidelberg 1985.
• Richard Davenport-Hines: Auden . William Heinemann, London 1995.
• Hannah Arendt : I remember Wystan H. Auden. (on the occasion of his death), in: Menschen in sinsteren Zeiten Ed. Ursula Ludz, Piper, Munich 2001. ISBN 3-492-23355-4 , pp. 318–328.
• Christian Martin Fuchs : "For the Time Being". Suggestions for reading Wystan Hugh Auden. In: present. Magazine for Austria and the surrounding area. Edited by Stefanie Holzer and Walter Klier (Innsbruck), issue 14/1992.
• Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb: Regions of sorrow: Anxiety and messianism in Hannah Arendt and WH Auden. Stanford Univ. Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8047-4511-0 and ISBN 0-8047-4510-2 (English)
• Helmut Neundlinger: Thanksgiving for a habitat. WH Auden in Kirchstetten. Literature edition Lower Austria, St. Pölten 2018. ISBN 978-3-902717-44-3 .

Web links

Wikiquote: WH Auden  - Quotes

Commons : WH Auden  - Collection of Images

• Literature by and about WH Auden in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about WH Auden  in the German Digital Library
• WH Auden in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• A song of fame for WH Auden and his verses by Hannes Stein in the world
• The WH Auden Society (English)
• WH Auden at Swarthmore (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Benjamin Britten: "Our Hunting Fathers" for voice and orchestra op. 8., Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich. Archived from the original on March 2, 2014 ; accessed on April 26, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Members: Wystan Hugh Auden. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 13, 2019 . 
3. ^ Lower Austrian museums: Wystan Hugh Auden memorial, Kirchstetten [1]
4. ↑ Jan Knopf (Ed.): Brecht Handbook. Vol. 5th register. Stuttgart: Metzler 2003. p. 98.