This documentary reveals how Auden's 20th century poetry helps us to have a better understanding of the 21st century and the tumultuous political climate in which we all now live. Kallman was the sole beneficiary of Auden's estate, but himself died intestate in 1975, with the result that the estate was inherited by his next-of-kin, his father, a New York dentist in his eighties. Auden died in Austria on 29 September 1973. In the late 1950s, Auden and Kallman had bought a house in Austria, where they spent six months of every year.
In 1972, with his health declining, Auden along with Kallman left America and moved to live in Oxford, in a cottage belonging to Auden's old college, Christ Church. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford University. He collaborated with Kallman on the libretto for Stravinsky's opera "The Rake's Progress" in 1951. Kallman had frequent "extra-marital" sexual encounters, though always with other men.Īuden continued to publish poetry including "The Age of Anxiety" in 1947 for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Auden occasionally dabbled with heterosexuality while also indulging with rent boys and rough trade. Neither man was totally faithful to the other. Auden taught at a number of American universities and, in 1945, took US citizenship. who would be his partner for the rest of his life. In New York, Auden met the gay poet Chester Kallman, 12 years his junior. This was a controversial move, regarded by some as a flight from danger on the eve of war in Europe. In 1939, Auden and Isherwood emigrated to the United States. It was a marriage of convenience to enable her to gain British citizenship and escape Nazi Germany. They never lived together and the marriage was never consummated. He collaborated with Christopher Isherwood, the renowned gay novelist who he had met at school, on a number of plays and in the 1930s the two of them lived together in Berlin where they had gone to escape England's then repressive attitudes to homosexuality.Īlthough always open about his sexuality, while in Berlin he married Erika Mann, the daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann. Wystan Hugh Auden, a gay man and probably the greatest 20th century poet in the English speaking world, was born in York on 21 February 1907.
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