Auden - Softcover

This biography of W.H. Auden, one of the best-known English poets of the century, is not only a study of his life and ideas, but a commentary on the wars, ideologies and attitudes of his times. Auden saw his life as a quest, and his journey took him from Edwardian middle-class boyhood in Birmingham and precocious poetic brilliance at Oxford in the 1920s to bold sexual and psychological experiments in Weimar Berlin and radical politics in 1930s Britain, followed by a searching self-reinvention and grave and unpopular revision of his work after settling in the USA in 1939. Davenport-Hines describes how Auden always pushed himself to surmount new tests and ordeals in his quest, and argues that his life reached its pitch of emotional excitement and intellectual integrity in the 1940s and 1950s.