AUDEN

Poet of the world.

The prolific biographer Ackroyd turns his gaze to W.H. Auden (1907-1973), a poet who straddled Britain and America, traditional verse and innovative drama, and canonical high culture and an active gay life. Ackroyd’s Auden is a product of his family and his heritage. His name, perhaps, goes back to Old English. His forbears may have gone back to the Old Norse. His early life was lived among the mines and forests of the English landscape. Auden’s youthful poems become, in effect, excavations, mining experience for deeper feeling. Noticed early on by T.S. Eliot, Auden became the poetic voice of England, between the wars: skeptical, ironic, longing for intimacy, but always shying away. His trip to Iceland and his eventual resettlement in America only enhanced his sense of being something of a temporary visitor on this earth. And yet, for all his otherness, Auden became an arbiter of mid-20th-century literature, as influential as Eliot. As such a figure, he returned to Oxford as professor of poetry and, in the 1960s and ’70s, lived the life of one of the world’s literary grandees. Ackroyd gives us a year-by-year (at times, even a day-by-day) life of Auden, rich with detail on the places he lived and the people he loved. Auden’s poetry comes in largely to illustrate the life. There’s relatively little extended literary criticism here, and nothing on the complex reputation Auden has had in the half century since his death. Professors of literature will find the book less textured than recent studies by Edward Mendelson and Nicholas Jenkins. But for readers who value linear, character-driven narrative, written in a direct conversational style, this is a book for them.

The lives and loves of W.H. Auden, told with flair and flourish.