The Rake's Progress Teachers Guide - San Francisco Opera

W.H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) who signed his works W. H.
Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of
the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its
engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form, and content. The
central themes of his poetry are: personal love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals,
and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world
of nature.
Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English
Literature at Oxford. His early poems, in the late 1920s and 1930s, alternated between
obscure modern styles and accessible traditional ones, were written in an intense and
dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He
became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to
the United States in 1939. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in
a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined new forms devised by
Auden himself with traditional forms and styles. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems
focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a
particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of
strong feelings.
He was also 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. Throughout his career he was both controversial and
influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the
clocks") and "September 1, 1939", became widely known through films, broadcasts, and
popular media.
Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them
book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from
obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and
limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a
baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged from
pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms
and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.
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