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DateLine Sunday, 24 February 2008

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W. H. Auden symbolic and rational

Wystan Hugh Auden, one of the very greatest twentieth-century English poets, was born in York, England in 1907. His father George was a doctor and his mother Constance was a nurse. Auden moved to Birmingham with his family during his childhood and was educated at Christ's Church, Oxford.

As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dikinson, G. M. Hopkins, and the Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendship with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christoper Isherwood.

In 1928, Auden published his first book of verse, and his collection of poems, published in 1930, which established him as the leading voice of a new generation. When he had completed school, Auden travelled in Germany. In 1937 he went with Nac Neice to Iceland and in 1938 with Isherwood to China.

Literary results of these journeys were "Letters from Iceland" and "Journey to a War", the first a written collaboration, notably 1935's "The Dog Beneath the Skin" and "The Ascent of F 6."

In 1939 Auden took up residence in United States, supporting himself by teaching at various universities. In 1946 he became a U.S citizen, by which time his literary career had become a series of well-recognized successes.

He received the Pulitzer Prize and Bollingen Award and enjoyed his standing as one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. From 1956 to 1961 he was a professor of poetry at Oxford University.

Auden's highly regarded attribute was the ability to think symbolically and rationally at the same time. so that intellectual ideas were transformed into a uniquely personal, idiosyncratic often witty imagistic idioms. Often Auden's poetry may seem a rather marginal criticism of life and society written from the sidelines.

In his final years, Auden wrote the volumes, "City Without Walls and Many Other Poems", "Epitile to a God'son" and Other Poems" and the posthumously published, Thank You Fog:Last Poems".

All three works are noted for their lexical range and humanitarian content. Auden's open chat for altering and discarding poems has prompted several anthologies since his death, in September 28,1973, in Vienna, Austria.

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