W. H. Auden married Thomas Mann's daughter to get her out of Germany
In 1935, with the Nazis about to strip Erika Mann of her citizenship, Christopher Isherwood turned down her request for a marriage of convenience and pointed her to his friend Auden. The poet agreed at once. They never lived together, yet stayed married and on good terms until her death in 1969.
Auden was born in York on 21 February 1907, the youngest of three sons of a physician and a woman trained as a missionary nurse. Both grandfathers were Church of England clergymen, and he later credited the high Anglican services of his childhood with his love of music and language. Growing up near Birmingham, he expected until fifteen to become a mining engineer; the decaying Pennine lead-mining village of Rookhope stayed a sacred landscape for him.
At Gresham's School in 1922 a friend's casual question about whether he wrote poetry made him realise that was his calling. He went to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1925 to read biology, switched to English, and heard J. R. R. Tolkien lecture on Old English verse. Friends there included Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, lumped together in the 1930s as the Auden Group despite differing views. He left in 1928 with a third-class degree.
T. S. Eliot accepted his first book, Poems, for Faber in 1930. Plays co-written with Isherwood made him known as a left-wing writer, and he tried to marry art with reporting: a trip to Iceland, a week writing propaganda in Republican Spain that left him feeling useless, and six months in wartime China. Spain complicated his politics. In January 1939 he and Isherwood sailed for New York, a move many in Britain saw as betrayal.
In America his work turned religious, and he later traced his 1940 return to the Anglican Church partly to a sudden feeling of love for three colleagues in June 1933. His long poem The Age of Anxiety won the Pulitzer Prize and gave the modern era a catchphrase. He became a citizen in 1946 while keeping British nationality, taught at Oxford as Professor of Poetry from 1956 to 1961, and died on 29 September 1973. Joseph Brodsky judged his mind the century's greatest.
Source: W. H. Auden
