Stop all the clocks - WH Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973)

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England on 21 February 1907 the third son of a successful  doctor and a missionary nurse, he grew up in Solihull and described his early advantages as 'good genes and good education'.

WH Auden was a uniquely modern poet and one who speaks unmistakably to our modern times. He came of age at a moment when the intellectual elites of Europe were in tumult over the rise of dictators across the continent, and was one of the few writers to come out of the period alive in body and soul. His politics formed an intrinsic part of his writing, and were the basis on which Auden’s hatred of totalitarianism and demand for total intellectual freedom, were founded.

He was the bright young thing of dour, embittered thirties Britain, a man whose image and writings brought the best out of him and the worst out of others. Auden’s genius to put the most complex of literary and political emotions into the most simple, elegiac verse.

He received a public education, first at St Edmund's Hindhood and then at Gresham's School, Holt in Norfolk. In 1925 he entered Christ Church, Oxford University where he studied English literature.It was during his time at Oxford that he formed an association with a group of young literary intellectuals including Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice.

After graduation in 1928, Auden spent almost 12 months in Berlin. Like Isherwood and Spender, part of the attraction of going to Berlin for Auden was to enjoy the city’s tolerant attitude towards homosexuality. He initially lodged with family connections in an affluent but semi-rural setting at Potsdamer Chausse 40, by the Wannsee; but he soon moved to the much shabbier working-class district of Kreuzberg, where he was freer and closer to the city’s famous gay nightlife. Auden’s new place in Fürbingerstraße 8 was, in fact, down the road from the Cosy Corner, to which Auden introduced Isherwood on his first visit. In Berlin, Auden met the English anthropologist John Layard, through whom he became acquainted with the theories of the American psychologist Homer Lane, who argued that repression was the cause of physical illness. 

Although Auden wrote no poem or text that was strictly about Berlin, his experiences in the city caused two important transformations that had a deep impact on his writing: he became aware of social injustice and he embraced his homosexual identity with gusto. 

By the early 1930s he had emerged as the pre-eminent figure in a group of young writers who boldly asserted that they could speak for the inter-war generation.Strongly influenced by Freudian Psychoanalysis, his studies in anthropology, and by left-wing political ideologies, Auden was strongly anti-Romantic and rejected existing literary conventions and the need to fit his poetry to any particular style. 

Rather, he forged a reputation as a virtuoso exhibiting an enormous range of technique and form in his works, variously employing sonnets, ballads and numerous strict, metered patterns of his own devising.  His use of the vernacular, mixed syntax and his own special vocabulary mark his earlier work, although they are curbed somewhat in his later pieces

Auden made his reputation in the intensely political ‘30s, when it was hard for the most reluctant to avoid political involvement. And early on in his career he showed his inclination towards the left wing, which was against the rise of dictatorship in Europe. He even served as stretcher-bearer for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. His achievement as a poet lies in the fact that with his poetry he managed to implicate with utmost sensitivity the altering moods and opinions of his time. 

His first volume of poems was published in 1930. the collection is political in nature and his attitude towards poetry remained such till the end of WWII.

Although gay, Auden married  Erika Mann in 1935 to enable her to escape persecution in Nazi Germany.Before the war broke out in 1939 Auden and Christopher Isherwood left Europe for America. He had earlier collaborated with Isherwood to write the stage play The Dog Beneath the Skin. This move provoked the ire of many belonging to his country’s literary circles.

In 1939, Auden fell in love with Chester Kallman and regarded their relationship as a marriage, but this ended in 1941 when Kallman refused to accept the faithful relations that Auden demanded. However, the two maintained their friendship, and from 1947 until Auden's death they lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relationship, often collaborating on opera libretti such as that of The Rake's Progress, (1951) to music by Igor Stravinsky. Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance.
Stop all the clocks. WH Auden  Auden settled in New York but never entirely severed connections with Britain, especially Oxford, where he was professor of poetry from 1956 to 1961. Auden continued to publish volumes of new poetry, among them Another Time (1940), For the Time Being (1944), The Age of Anxiety (1947, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize), Nones (1951), The Shield of Achilles (1956), Homage to Clio (1960), and City Without Walls (1969). He also collaborated with Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers (1961).

His selections from the writings of Kierkegaard (1952, 1955) are indicative of the way his thought turned away from the Marxist preoccupations of the 1930s to a kind of Christian existentialism. He also edited several anthologies, wrote critical essays, and made a number of translations. In 1966 he published his Collected Shorter Poems 1927–57 and two years later his Collected Longer Poems.

In 1951, shortly before the two British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the USSR, Burgess attempted to phone Auden to arrange a vacation visit to Ischia that he had earlier discussed with Auden; Auden never returned the call and had no further contact with either spy, but a media frenzy ensued in which his name was mistakenly associated with their escape. The frenzy was repeated when the MI5 documents on the incident were released in 2007.

In 1956 Auden was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.  Auden died in his sleep of a heart attack on September 28 1973, after a poetry reading to the Austrian Society of Literature in Vienna; he was 66 years old.  His funeral was held at Kirchstetten on the 14th October and drew mourners from Britain and the United States. The procession to the church was led by Chester Kallman who died two years later in Athens.  Auden is commemorated with a plaque in 'Poets' Corner', Westminster Abbey, London.  One of the poems from Twelve Songs (sometimes known as Funeral Blues) was famously featured in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential, and critical views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive. treating him as a lesser figure than W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot.to strongly affirmative, as in Joseph Brodsky's statement that he had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century". After his death, his poems became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media and is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Stop all the clocks - WH Aiden.

 Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

 Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

 Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 

 Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead  

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

He was my North, my South, my East and West, 

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good. 

Here's a link to the Auden Society

https://www.audensociety.org/