Wystan Hugh Auden 1907 - 1973
Wystan
Auden was born in York and educated at Christ Church
College, Oxford. He was seen as one of the 'progressive
poets' of the 1930s. These writers held left-wing views, or indeed openly
Marxist, and were concerned with social problems. Auden spent time travelling;
he lived for some time in pre-Hitler Berlin,
sharing rooms with Christopher Isherwood (he was a declared gay). Auden also
went to Spain
in 1937, during the civil war, to serve as an ambulance driver on the
republican side. The experience was in many ways traumatic for him, due to the
horrors of the war. In 1937 he married Erika Mann, daughter of the German
novelist Thomas Mann, to give her British nationality so that she could escape
from Nazi Germany. In 1938 he went to China with Isherwood to follow the
China-Japan war. In 1939 he and Isherwood went to live in America, when the war broke out. In
1946 Auden became an American citizen. However, he never lost contact with
Europe: he died in Vienna
in 1973.
Texts:
●
Refugee Blues
This is a poem about a political
refugees and is in the form of a blues song. Its subject is the Jews who
in 1939 had to flee from Germany
because of Nazi persecution. Here is built an analogy of the jews
with all suffering and persecuted races in history. Death is present
throughout, and the poem ends with the image of the soldiers looking for the
Jews.
