W. H. Auden (1907–1973)

W. H. Auden was born in northern England in 1907, attended Gresham's School, Norfolk, then Oxford. He began writing at school, and continued energetically at university, becoming central figure of the so-called "Auden Group." After spending the 1930's mostly writing and travelling, he emigrated to the USA in 1939 and was naturalized in 1946, but returned to Oxford to live in 1972. Auden's reputation bloomed early, and he was regarded as a major poet from his twenties onward. From 1958 he spent the summers in his farmhouse in Kirchstetten, Austria, where he was buried after dying in Vienna in 1973.