X-Nico

unusual facts about W.H. Auden



A. D. Hope

His influences were Pope and the Augustan poets, Auden, and Yeats; he was a polymath, very largely self-taught, and with a talent for offending his countrymen.

Arts Club of Chicago

Aside from visual artists, the Club also has hosted lectures and performances from such prominent musicians as John Cage, Philip Glass, Ramsey Lewis and Igor Stravinsky, and poets W. H. Auden, Gertrude Stein and William Butler Yeats.

Beattock Summit

The severity of the climb to the summit is referenced in W. H. Auden's poem Night Mail, written in 1936 for the G.P.O. Film Unit's celebrated production of the same name.

Bollingen Foundation

The Library of Congress fellows, who in that year included T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Conrad Aiken, gave the 1949 prize to Ezra Pound for his 1948 Pisan Cantos.

Chester Kallman

Don Giovanni (1961, with W. H. Auden, for an NBC Opera Theatre production of the opera by Mozart).

Diana Rowan

Her compositions are inspired by Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Greek poet Odysseas Elytis, and English/US poet W.H. Auden, among others, as well as Celtic and Greek myths.

Dunblane Cathedral

The quotations on the stone are by E V Rieu ("He called a little child to him..."), Richard Henry Stoddard ("...the spirit of a little child"), Bayard Taylor ("But still I dream that somewhere there must be The spirit of a child that waits for me") and W. H. Auden ("We are linked as children in a circle dancing").

Epilogue For W. H. Auden

MacNeice spent his first week in Reykjavik, after which the two poets took part in an expedition to circumnavigate the Langjökull (or Long Glacier) on horseback.

First Things First

"First Things First", a 1956 poem by W. H. Auden, which closes with the oft-quoted line "Thousands have lived without love, not one without water."

Guild of Scholars of The Episcopal Church

The Guild was founded in 1945 and has included such eminent members as Cleanth Brooks, Brooks Otis, Henry Babcock Veatch, Frederick Pottle, W. H. Auden, Dell Hymes, Hyatt Waggoner and Richard W. Bailey.

Hermit Songs

Written in 1953 on a grant from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, it takes as its basis a collection of anonymous poems written by Irish monks and scholars from the 8th to the 13th centuries, in translations by W. H. Auden, Chester Kallman, Howard Mumford Jones, Kenneth Jackson and Sean O'Faolain.

Horae Canonicae

Horae Canonicae is a series of poems by W. H. Auden written between 1949 and 1955.

I Am an Impure Thinker

It has been recognized as a summary of Rosenstock-Huessy's insights into Western culture by such thinkers as, W. H. Auden, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin E. Marty, and Harold J. Berman.

Kirchstetten

It was the home during part of their lives to the Austrian poet Josef Weinheber and the English poet W. H. Auden.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Largely derived from Ovid, the painting is described in W. H. Auden's famous poem Musée des Beaux-Arts, named after the museum in which the painting is housed in Brussels, and became the subject of a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams, as well as Lines on Bruegel's "Icarus" by Michael Hamburger.

Lost and Safe

It is in the same style of their previous albums, continuing their rich use of samples as diverse as Raymond Baxter ("That's the picture. You s-you see it for yourself."), W. H. Auden ("This great society is going smash / A culture is no better than its woods", from his poem "Bucolics: II, Woods"), and a reading of Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky".

Michael Andre

Interviews with W. H. Auden, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, James Wright, Allen Ginsberg, James Dickey, and Corso with scholarly commentary were accepted as his doctoral dissertation at Columbia in 1973.

New York Quarterly

The NYQ is widely known for featuring poems and/or interviews with writers such as Charles Bukowski, W. H. Auden, Anne Sexton, Ted Kooser, Franz Wright, Karl Shapiro, Macdonald Carey, Richard Eberhart, Michael McClure, and Lyn Lifshin.

Play of Daniel

The latter play was revived in the 1950s by Noah Greenberg, director of the New York Pro Musica; a commentary in English, written and performed by W. H. Auden, was used in some of their performances.

Poetry Project

Housed in the historic St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, the grounds are the site of historic memorials to poets Paul Blackburn, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Scholnick, W.H. Auden, Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, and others.

Ronald Firbank

The poet W. H. Auden praised him highly in a radio broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in June 1961 (the text of the broadcast was published in The Listener of 8 June 1961).

Selly Park

W. H. Auden (1907–1973), who briefly lived in the grounds of Selly Wick House.

Shield of Achilles

The poem The Shield of Achilles (1952) by W. H. Auden reimagines Homer's description in 20th century terms.

Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture

Among the more than 300 Fellows of the Society have been Mircea Eliade, Denise Levertov, Sallie McFague, Cleanth Brooks, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and John Updike.

The Earth Compels

The poem 'Iceland' reflects the journey MacNeice took with W. H. Auden in the summer of 1936, while 'Bagpipe Music' was inspired by a journey to the Hebrides in 1937 and was later described by MacNeice as 'a satirical elegy for the Gaelic districts of Scotland and indeed for all traditional culture'.

The final poem in the collection, Epilogue, is subtitled 'For W. H. Auden', and reviews the Iceland trip MacNeice and Auden had taken together; the poem mentions events that had occurred while MacNeice and Auden were in Iceland, such as the fall of Seville (marking the start of the Spanish Civil War) and the Olympic Games in Berlin.

The Rake's Progress

The libretto, written by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, is based loosely on the eight paintings and engravings A Rake's Progress (1733–1735) of William Hogarth, which Stravinsky had seen on 2 May 1947, in a Chicago exhibition.

Thomas Mann

:Alan Bennett's play The Habit of Art, in which Benjamin Britten visits W. H. Auden to discuss the possibility of Auden writing the libretto for Britten's opera version of Death in Venice.

Un re in ascolto

In addition, W. H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest was a source.

Unmuzzled OX

Unmuzzled OX was located near the World Trade Center, and a translation by W. H. Auden of an opera by Carlo Goldoni appeared shortly before September 11, 2001.


see also

Edward Mendelson

In Alexander McCall Smith's novel The Right Attitude to Rain (2006), the main character exchanges letters with Mendelson about W.H. Auden and Robert Burns, and he then appears in The Comfort of Saturdays (2007).

Floating Down to Camelot

The novel includes many quotations, not only from Tennyson but also from Thomas Hood, William Thackeray, and W. H. Auden.

Turville-Petre

Francis Turville-Petre, an English archaeologist, famous for discovering the 'Galilee Skull', and a friend of Christoped Isherwood and W. H. Auden