Some of WH Auden’s couplets have the familiarity of poetry catchphrases. Even as a youngster, Auden had a startling capacity for colourful language. “Mrs Carritt, this tea is like tepid pi ...

Only later did I learn that they were the opening words of a poem by W.H. Auden, who would become one of my favorite writers. Many readers, admittedly, will be happy with just the Vintage ...

F or Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher, poetry was simply writing that “fails” to reach the end of the line. For W.H. Auden, a ...

While some of Auden’s early poems are engagé leftist, more often there’s a subterranean patriotic current. The early poems, Jenkins writes, “were underwritten by an anti-metropolitan ...

In his elegy for W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden wrote that, when the Irish poet died in 1939, “he became his admirers.” Becoming his admirers is, however, only the first stage of a poet’s posthumous ...

When a new Poet Laureate had to be chosen in 1972, WH Auden was widely seen as the obvious choice. Many academics regarded Auden – known for works including September 1, 1939, and Stop All The ...

COMPLETEWORKS OF W.H. AUDEN POEMS — VOLS I AND II edited by Edward Mendelson (Princeton £48 each, 848pp and 1140pp) In the phenomenally successful film Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994 ...

H. Auden’s most inflaming line (and this is the man who once wrote 34 stanzas about a “day for a lay”). Hear it, however, not as a lament -- though he speaks it during one -- as much as a ...

I thought of it during the first chapter of Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness, when the young poet is spotted “very early one day several miles from school alone on ...

Downing Street rejected WH Auden for poet laureate over a "filthy" poem that graphically described gay sex, unearthed documents have revealed. In 1972, Number 10 officials told then-Prime Minister ...

The poet as a young man became the “mouthpiece of an epoch” by connecting his private world with the public one. By Andrew Motion Edward Mendelson, WH Auden’s literary executor and editor, has called ...