Wystan Hugh Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden was the son of a nurse and a doctor and the third of three brothers. His father had broad scientific and scholarly interests; his mother was an accomplished musician and devoutly religious; both parents were committed to public service. He was educated at St. Edmund's preparatory school in Surrey (1915-1920); at Gresham's in Holt, Norfolk (1920-1925); and at Christ Church College, Oxford (1925-1928), which he entered on a scientific fellowship, later switching to English. At Oxford, and throughout the decade following his graduation, he was at the center of a group of young writers (including Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis) that his voice especially seemed to define: the Auden Generation, as Sam Hynes describes it in a book by that title. After being graduated from Oxford with - like other great poets before him - an undistinguished degree (third-class honors), Auden lived for eighteen months in Berlin. There are numerous facts in Wystan's life that are worth being covered in a research paper. Some of his time was devoted to learning German, but more of it to taking full advantage of the excitement and freedom of Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. Affairs with proletarian German boys helped confirm his sexual nature although he was briefly engaged to a young woman. The music of political cabaret songs, as well as some of Brecht's lyrics, provided him with models for later songs. After he returned to England in late 1929, he taught successively at two schools. He was an enthusiastic, eccentric, inventive, and popular schoolmaster. His first two commercially published volumes - Poems (1930) and The Orators (1932) - appeared in the years just after his graduation from Oxford and established him, by the age of twenty-five, as an important poet. The 1928 volume called Poems was hand-printed in an edition of approximately forty-five copies by Auden's friend, Stephen Spender. Perhaps no other poet since Keats has shown such precocious brilliance. A posthumously published volume, The English Auden (1977), includes virtually all the early poems and prose in order of composition and in the form in which they first appeared (Auden was a continual reviser, rearranger, and even discarder of his early poems). The revised versions of the early poems as well as most of his later works appear in Collected Poems (1976).

Auden wrote his first major work, Paid on Both Sides: A Charade, while still at Oxford. T. S. Eliot accepted it for publication in the Criterion in 1928, publishing it in 1930; it also appeared in Poems (1930). By charade, Auden meant the kind of elaborate dramatic game played at English country houses; in fact, he originally intended it for performance at that of a friend; the charade, Auden is said to have thought, was one of the few living dramatic forms. Paid on Both Sides presents the story of a feud between two families, of an attempt to end the feud, and of the attempt's failure. The work has a complex lineage. Most immediately, it derives from Eliot's The Waste Land (1922, which Auden read in 1926, when it became widely known at Oxford, its irony, humor, fragmentary structure, and "unpoetic" verse upsetting the dominant pastoralism of Georgian verse). From The Waste Land he probably learned a way of constructing a large work by interweaving diverse threads of material. At Oxford Auden had been reading a great deal of early Germanic literature, especially Anglo-Saxon poetry; and he had known since childhood the Icelandic sagas, which describe in vivid detail complex and bloody feuds. Woven into Paid on Both Sides are allusions to, conventions, and scenes from traditional English mummers' plays; John Fuller traces some direct borrowings. Paid on Both Sides particularly echoes Anglo-Saxon poetry, with its accentual meter, its organization around a succession of phrases, often appositional, and its concrete, monosyllabic language. The landscape evoked also resembles that of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic verse. The story takes place at no particular time; some elements seem very much up-to-date; others belong to literary and social antiquity. As several commentators remark, following something Auden said to Christopher Isherwood, the play seems to be partly about some of the bloodier Icelandic sagas, partly about a school officer-training corps; it is meant to suggest a connection between those two worlds. To learn more about Hugh Auden Wystan, use our custom essay writing service.