It’s the birthday of W.H. Auden (1907-1973), now considered, depending on who you ask, to be the third greatest of the three great English poets of the 20th century (behind T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats) or the first greatest of those three great English poets or possibly the second greatest but I haven’t run across that specific claim. It’s his birthday so for today we’ll claim he’s the greatest.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, Yorkshire, England, and grew up in Birmingham. His father was a physician and a professor and his mother had been a nurse; they were strongly Anglo-Catholic but Auden rejected his faith as a teenager, then in later life reconverted to Christianity. (Well, he gave it a shot.) He started out studying science, switched to poetry, graduated from Oxford in 1928, and spent a year in Berlin before returning to Scotland and England to teach school boys.

Auden became such a Big Important Poet that his career is divided into several different periods, including the one where he moved to the U.S. and became a citizen, and I invite anyone who doesn’t have children home from school on winter break to write a brilliant and succinct summary of those periods. (Britannica.com actually does a nice job.) What is less well known is that Auden evidently went around doing good deeds in private and not letting anyone know—even at times appearing surly or selfish to hide his good deeds. When an old woman at his church was frequently afraid at night, Auden slept outside her apartment in the hall to help her feel safe. Another time he obnoxiously demanded early payment from NBC for a production of The Magic Flute for which he’d helped translate the libretto; NBC later learned that he’d given the check over to the woman who ran a homeless shelter and would otherwise have had to shut it down.

Auden’s Ode to the Medieval Poets begins:

Chaucer, Langland, Douglas, Dunbar with all your

brother Anons, how on earth did you ever manage,

without anaesthetics or plumbing,

in daily peril from witches, warlocks,

 

lepers, The Holy office, foreign mercenaries

burning as they came, to write so cheerfully,

with no grimaces of self-pathos?…

(Read the rest here.)

Have a splendid boys-all-over-the-house sort of day and stay scrupulously honest to the data.