Wystan Hugh Auden, an English schoolmaster in his youth, began crafting a series of remarkable poems during the mid-1930s. His work included rollicking ballads, tender love sonnets, and philosophical reflections on the tumultuous events of the 20th century—from fascism to airplanes to oncology. These rhymed and metered poems achieved something many had considered impossible: they transformed the “unpoetic” aspects of modern life into poetry that even traditional lovers of English literature from Shakespeare to Tennyson could appreciate.
This reinvigoration of poetry was both exhilarating and optimistic. Among 20th-century poets, only Auden’s contemporary and former collaborator Louis MacNeice came close to matching his impact. While Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot had approached modernity with skepticism and dismissal, Auden embraced the era. He read Freud, drove a car (sometimes under the influence), and watched television (though rarely). His later works would reference events as diverse as the partition of India and the Apollo moon landing. In fact, his poem “September 1, 1939” reimagined George H.W. Bush’s concept of “Thousand Points of Light.”
Auden’s verses were unpredictable yet memorable—whether in the surreal ballad “As I Walked Out One Evening”:
The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
or in the stark sonnet from “In Time of War”:
Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan
For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.
Since Auden’s death in 1973, numerous books have explored his life and work. The English novelist, historian, and biographer Peter Ackroyd has recently added to this literature with his new book on the poet. Ackroyd acknowledges Auden’s monumental contributions but also questions the depth of his early work.
Auden was the grandson of two clergymen, remained connected to Christianity throughout his life, and embraced high Anglicanism (Anglo-Catholicism) in his thirties—a practice he maintained for decades. A leftist in his youth—though not a Communist Party member—he moved from England to the United States after gaining fame there, becoming an influential figure in both New York’s East Village and Ann Arbor. He lived openly as a homosexual across various social settings.
Ackroyd’s biography of Auden is less comprehensive than Humphrey Carpenter’s standard work and offers more superficial analysis of his poetry than Edward Mendelson’s extensive two-volume study. However, the book’s greatest strength lies in Ackroyd’s critical perspective on Auden’s early poetry. When Auden was just 22, T.S. Eliot called him “about the best poet that I have discovered in several years.” Eliot was wrong, but as Ackroyd notes, poetry could be a “fake-it-till-you-make-it” endeavor—Auden would later develop beyond early expectations. While Auden’s early work is striking and fresh, it lacks coherence and depth. Those who cherish his legacy often overestimate it; the vividness they associate with Auden emerges only in flashes when one has knowledge of specific subjects like communism or homosexuality.
Ackroyd identifies a pivotal shift in Auden’s career during the mid-1930s, marked by the long poem “Letter to Lord Byron” (1936), composed during a trip to Iceland. This work freed him from the need to be overtly political or significant. As Ackroyd describes, “A fundamental gaiety flows through this technical precision.” Between his 1936 collection Look, Stranger and the 1955 book The Shield of Achilles, Auden achieved his artistic peak.
His creativity was deeply rooted in erudition. Like Bob Dylan in folk music, Auden mastered every technique across generations of poetry. This made him a “schoolmaster of genius,” as Ackroyd terms him. He taught courses on topics ranging from “Romanticism from Rousseau to Hitler” and encouraged students to write parodies to understand poetic structures.
Auden’s reverence for traditional forms reflected a conservative temperament evident in all aspects of his life. When his friend Christopher Isherwood studied the Hindu Vedas, Auden dismissed it as “simply not a gentleman’s religion.” Ackroyd also notes that Auden faced criticism for potentially ventriloquizing others’ work—a critique later applied to postmodern artists.
What sets Ackroyd’s book apart is its focus on Auden’s sexuality. While his knowledge of North American geography is shaky (he believes Montreal lies on the U.S. border and Indiana University is 200 miles north of Chicago), he demonstrates deep insight into modern European homosexuality. Ackroyd notes that young Auden “picked up passengers on trains and soldiers in London,” but was also aware of trysting spots like parks, public lavatories, and the Oxford Canal.
A significant chapter in Auden’s life began after his move to the United States: he fell for Chester Kallman, a poet student ten years younger. Their relationship lasted until Auden’s death, though it never became stable. Kallman was described by Ackroyd as having “a roving eye,” and Auden continued to hire prostitutes.
Auden himself had a reputation for self-destructive habits: he smoked constantly, burned holes in clothes worn for days, bit his nails down to stubs, and left chaos wherever he went. James Stern, one of his closest friends, noted that Auden could “wreck a room” at an astonishing pace. Igor Stravinsky called him “the dirtiest man I have ever liked.” By his mid-40s, Auden had dentures.
Auden’s commitment to sincerity grew throughout his life. He came to despise what he saw as the phoniness in his early work and would revise it decades later with over-fussy corrections. In an attempt to justify this, he said: “In the historical circumstances under which we grew up, the temptations to fake feelings were unusually strong.” Yet by 1973, Auden had secured a place in English literary tradition—albeit with a growing awareness that this tradition might be nearing its end.
The book Auden, by Peter Ackroyd, was published by Reaktion Books (400 pages, $30).
Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books.