Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
W. H. Auden
-
Standard Name: Auden, W. H.
Used Form: Wystan Hugh Auden
WHA
has been called the outstanding poet of his generation. His prolific output of poetry is endlessly versatile, often deeply personal but usually also carrying political freight, often experimental, combining the classical and the colloquial, the lyric and the deliberately prosaic. He wrote a great deal in collaboration, often for stage or even operatic performance. He was a riveting lecturer and an unsystematic but always stimulating literary critic.
He was buried there two days later, having resisted the known wish of the Irish people that he should have a state funeral.
Tóibín, Colm. “A Djinn speaks”. London Review of Books, 20 Feb. 2003, pp. 19-24.
24
Auden
's poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats, included...
Education
Elizabeth Bishop
EB
loved the village school in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she learned to read and write. She later, supported by a Bishop family trust, attended first a summer camp, then a private school...
Family and Intimate relationships
Hannah Arendt
After less than a month as a widow, HA
received a proposal of marriage from W. H. Auden
, who was a friend but not a particularly close one. He suggested that they were both...
Friends, Associates
Marianne Moore
MM
corresponded with T. S. Eliot
from 1921 until the year before his death. She was a friend of H. D.
and of Bryher
, and her editors believe that every one of her five...
Friends, Associates
Sybille Bedford
Introduced to Aldous Huxley
and his wife Maria
by the South African poet Roy Campbell
while at Sanary, the young SB
became their intimate friend.
Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint, 2005.
249-50
She was later embarrassed by her earlier admiration for...
Other authors with connections to Bloomsbury were drawn to Wuhan: W. H. Auden
and Christopher Isherwood
visited the campus on 22 April 1938 during their longer trip on which they wrote about the Sino-Japanese...
While studying at King's CollegeSH
, an aspiring writer, wrote to novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson
and her writer husband C. P. Snow
for advice on the profession. The couple answered her letters and even...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Jennings
As a teenager, EJ
read T. S. Eliot
and (as she put it) wrote long poems of sort of vers libre which I imagined were influenced by Eliot, and which were very personal, in fact...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Ridler
AR
wrote that the two great influences on her as a poet (because they helped her to find her own voice) were Sir Thomas Wyatt
and W. H. Auden
. Eliot
, too, was inescapable...
Intertextuality and Influence
Liz Lochhead
The Recitations (poems in which the speaking voice is crucial, most of them sharply Scots-vernacular comments on sexual or gender relations) include the title piece, Bagpipe Muzak, Glasgow 1990. This laments (in a nice...
Intertextuality and Influence
Carol Ann Duffy
Duffy answers back not just to male historical figures but (as a reviewer pointed out) to the male poets who have re-imagined such figures, like Auden
in The Fall of Icarus. Elsewhere she remarks...
Timeline
By October 1928: Stephen Spender, as an Oxford undergraduate,...
Writing climate item
By October 1928
Stephen Spender
, as an Oxford undergraduate, self-published a booklet of poems entitled Nine Experiments.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
January 1933: The first number appeared of the periodical...
Writing climate item
January 1933
The first number appeared of the periodical New Verse, edited by Geoffrey Grigson
; it ran until May 1939.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
February 1936: The awesome trio of political theorist Harold...
Writing climate item
February 1936
The awesome trio
Laity, Paul. “The left’s ace of clubs”. Guardian Unlimited, 7 July 2001.
15 August 1947: British rule on the Indian subcontinent ended...
National or international item
15 August 1947
British rule on the Indian subcontinent ended in independence for India and Pakistan (which became Dominions within the Commonwealth), but also in Partition, which divided the new countries along religious lines.
Forbes, Peter, editor. Scanning the Century. Viking, 1999.
143-4
Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Editor Mendelson, Edward, Faber and Faber, 1976.
604
“The Legacy Events Index: India - Pakistan Partition”. The Legacy Project.
September 1949: PEN International held a conference in Venice....
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987.
124-6
By July 1964: Canadian writer Jane Rule issued in Canada...
Writing climate item
By July 1964
Canadian writer Jane Rule
issued in Canada and England her best-known novel, Desert of the Heart, whose title alludes to W. H. Auden
's poem on the death of Yeats
.
Healy, Eloise Klein. “Jane Rule: Inventing and Reinventing Community”. Women’s Review of Books, Vol.
25
, No. 1, Jan.–Feb. 2008, pp. 10-11.
10-11
Canadian Periodical Index. Canadian Library Association, 1928–2024.
17 (1964): 80
1979: Anna Adams published her verse letter A Reply...
Women writers item
1979
Anna Adams
published her verse letter A Reply to Intercepted Mail (A Verse-Letter to W. H. Auden
) in the Peterloo Poets series.