Wh auden gay

Reconciling Past and Display, Religion and Sexuality: W. H. Auden’s Proto-Queer Theology and the Queer Christian Movement

Abstract/Description

The 20th-century British poet W. H. Auden is an interesting case when viewed through a queer lens because his expansive career brims with homoerotic (and equally homosexual) undertones. Given the historic persecution of homosexuals and others proclaimed “deviants” in his lifetime, it is not surprising that Auden guarded himself by masking sentiments regarding his sexuality below the surface of his writing, though not so much that one could not detect it if aware of the coded jargon of certain queer communities (Bozorth 709). What Auden has said regarding his sexuality—in both his poetry and prose—varies over time, creating difficulties in discerning a definitive, or perhaps “final” judgment of himself in an ethical and moral sense. Critics widely agree that Auden was conflicted and continued to be so for most of his existence, coinciding with his shifting ideas of morality. When broken down into the heuristic “secular and sacred” view of Auden’s legacy (i.e. the view that his poetry shifted from propaganda to parable upon his emigration t

W H Auden

W H Auden(Wystan Hugh Auden, 1907-1973) was a poet, critic and scholar. We was born in York, the younghest son of a doctor and a nurse, he grew up in Birminghamand was educated at St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, Gresham's School, Norfolk, where he met Robert Medley, and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1935 he married the lesbian German penner and actress Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas Mann, to provide her with a British pasport and enable her to depart Germany.

Auden wrote passionately about social problems and post-World War I anxiety. His books of poems include Poems (1930); The Orators, an English Study (1932); Journey to a War (1939), which expressed his political and anti-war sentiments; Another Time (1940), which "contains lighter and more romantic verse;" and The Age of Anxiety (1947), which won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for poetry (however, his earlier operate is viewed by some critics as his best work). Auden's other awards included King George's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1937, the Bollingen Poetry Prize in 1954, and the National Medal for Literature in 1967. He also co-wrote three plays with Christopher Isherwood.

We're A Funny Pair

The Lgbtq+ Love Letters of W. H. Auden to Chester Kallman

Excerpts from My Valued Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries, Edited by Rictor Norton

Although Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–73) emigrated to the United States just before World War II and eventually became an American citizen, he always retained his roots in upper-class England, and his poetry reflects the intellectual ideals of Oxford University and the religious commitments of Anglicanism. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender were an inseparable trio who represented the new spirit of literature during the 1930s and 1940s. All were deeply influenced by the liberty of the Weimar Republic, specifically its decadent lgbtq+ subculture, which they experienced first-hand. Auden lived on Furbingertrasse in Berlin nearby the Cosy Corner, a working-class gay bar where he and Isherwood during 1929 searched for more than just "copy." Auden's diary for this period (he knew of 170 boy brothels) is considered too obscene for publication; he deliberately provoked his r

Image: The poets Auden and Spender, with Christopher Isherwood, in the 1930s

By chance, I’ve recently read an autobiography and a biography of two gay twentieth-century English poets: Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden. Although I read and write poetry myself, I am most definitely not an academic and am not going to attempt any compassionate of overarching intellectual analysis of how these poets’ lives influenced their poetry. For the purposes of this article, what interests me is how their sexuality affected their lives.

To kickoff, a little about each one:

Stephen Spender: His autobiography World Within World was published in 1951, when Spender was all of 42 years old. It’s mostly an account of his personal development during the turbulent 1930s, and in many ways acts as a requiem to a lost world, the pre-war Britain that even in 1951 was looking enjoy an entirely diverse epoch. Having lived through such a turbulent period in history, Spender must have felt a lot older than his years, and thus “qualified” to write his autobiography at such a tender age.

Spender seems to hold been what we would now label “bisexual,” althou