W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet and is widely considered one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Auden was born in York, and educated in British public (private) schools, before moving on to Oxford where he took his degree in English. In 1929, he went to Weimar Germany to escape the “repression” he found in England, but returned in less than a year, first as a tutor and then a teacher. He left England for America in 1939, meeting his long-time companion Chester Kallman, with whom he lived for the rest of his life. Auden became an American citizen in 1946, and from 1948 on divided his time primarily between winters in New York and summers in Austria where he died in 1973.