W. H. Auden

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
Literary responses Edna St Vincent Millay
Edmund Wilson disliked this work, apparently because the communist in it is just as ridiculous as the stockbroker, so that no authoritative, authorized, left-wing voice is supplied.
qtd. in
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
406
But its success was stunning.
qtd. in
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
405
Literary responses Naomi Mitchison
Winifred Holtby , writing in The Bookman, ranked this novel as the most important of the year (a year that saw the appearance of Woolf 's The Waves),
Squier, Susan M., and Naomi Mitchison. “Naomi Mitchison: The Feminist Art of Making Things Difficult”. Solution Three, Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1995, pp. 161-83.
165-6
and its author as...
Literary responses Hannah Arendt
When she sent a copy of this book to Martin Heidegger , he reacted with pique and anger at being forced to recognise the scope of her intellectual abilities and achievement, which she had always...
Literary responses A. E. Housman
The volume was not an instant success, though it was later admired by authors such as E. M. Forster and W. H. Auden .
Parker, Peter, editor. A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press, 1996.
345-6
Literary responses Stella Benson
Naomi Mitichison assured SB that the young Auden was fearfully interested in her poems (which Mitchison had been quoting).
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz, 1979.
136
Literary responses Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan , however, applies a withering pen to WC in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Literary responses Adrienne Rich
W. H. Auden , with genuine admiration but instinctive condescension, praised Rich's poems as neatly and modestly dressed. He found them like good girls who speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but...
Material Conditions of Writing Carson McCullers
She had the idea for the title novella when she and editor George Davis and poet W. H. Auden were in a bar where other customers included a woman who was tall and strong as...
Material Conditions of Writing E. J. Scovell
EJS began writing poetry in early childhood because of a love of meter and rhyme.
qtd. in
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
As an undergraduate at Oxford she was placing her poetry in university journals. She was one of the few women...
Material Conditions of Writing Adrienne Rich
Her father had planned for her to be a poet; he encouraged her to write something every day and show it to him.
qtd. in
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, 15 June 2002, pp. Review 20 - 3.
21
Though at some stages she hated this, she came to believe...
Occupation Margaret Haig Viscountess Rhondda
Women contributors ranged widely: Rebecca West , Stella Benson , Cicely Hamilton , Members of Parliament Lady Nancy Astor and Ellen Wilkinson , Virginia Woolf , Naomi Mitchison , E. M. Delafield , Rose Macaulay
Occupation Frances Horovitz
Patrick Magee , Harvey Hall , Stevie Smith , Hugh Dickson , and Basil Jones were the other readers for the project. The poets from whose work they read included W. B. Yeats , D. H. Lawrence

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