Auden

by R. P. T. Davenport-Hines (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1995

  $3.26

  W.H. Auden was the greatest English poet of the twentieth century. It is nearly fifteen years since his last biography, and the publication and discovery of a mass of new material now makes possible a bold reappraisal of his life and work. Auden wrote about the anguish and bafflement of the twentieth century. This biography is not only a study of the life and ideas of a great poet, but a commentary on the wars, ideologies, spiritual questioning and sexual attitudes of the century in which he lived. 'Unless I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day, I feel ill,' Auden once said. His biography is therefore a study of a man who was supremely dedicated as a writer - a model of what it means to be a poet - and is also a book which delves into and examines Auden's immensely challenging theories of living. Auden is a book about play and fun and teasing; about the redemptive power of love; about political violence; Christianity and existentialism; shame, suffering and penitence; literary coteries in Europe and the United States; lust, addictions and self-destruction. Above all, Davenport- Hines's elegant, readable, and scholarly biography is a book for our times.

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.26

  This biography of W.H. Auden, one of the best-known English poets of the century, is not only a study of his life and ideas, but a commentary on the wars, ideologies and attitudes of his times. Auden saw his life as a quest, and his journey took him from Edwardian middle-class boyhood in Birmingham and precocious poetic brilliance at Oxford in the 1920s to bold sexual and psychological experiments in Weimar Berlin and radical politics in 1930s Britain, followed by a searching self-reinvention and grave and unpopular revision of his work after settling in the USA in 1939. Davenport-Hines describes how Auden always pushed himself to surmount new tests and ordeals in his quest, and argues that his life reached its pitch of emotional excitement and intellectual integrity in the 1940s and 1950s.