W. H. Auden: A Biography

About this book

Few of W. H. Audens friends adhered to his request to burn his letters after he died. Humphrey Carpenters study quotes much of this correspondence for the first time as well as drawing on other such rare material as Audens unpublished verse juvenilia notebooks and the journal the young poet kept during a stay in Berlin. This biography traces the artistic development of the most influential English poet of his generation explaining the in-jokes in his early work and the romantic crisis that inspired his last three long poems.