Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone , form , and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as " Funeral Blues "; on political and social themes, such as " September 1, " and " The Shield of Achilles "; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety ; and on religious themes, such as " For the Time Being " and " Horae Canonicae ".
Auden was born in York and grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional, middle-class family. He attended various English independent or public schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. After a few months in Berlin in β29, he spent five years β teaching in British private preparatory schools. In , he moved to the United States; he became an American citizen in , retaining his British citizenship.
Auden taught from to in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the s. Auden came to wide public attention in with his first book, Poems ; it was followed in by The Orators. Three plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood between and built his reputation as a left-wing political writer. Auden moved to the United States partly to escape this reputation, and his work in the s, including the long poems "For the Time Being" and " The Sea and the Mirror ", focused on religious themes.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his long poem The Age of Anxiety , the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era.
Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. Critical views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive treating him as a lesser figure than W. Yeats and T. Eliot to strongly affirmative as in Joseph Brodsky 's statement that he had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century".
