In Love with Language

It’s the birthday of English poet W.H. Auden (1907) (books by this author), who once
said, “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” Auden published around 400 poems in his lifetime, including haikus, villanelles, ballads, sonnets, and limericks.

T.S. Eliot is quite at a loss
When clubwomen bustle across
At literary teas
Crying, “What, if you please,
Did you mean by The Mill On the Floss?”

One of his most famous poems is “September 1, 1939,” written in a bar in New York City on the eve of World War II. The poem became very famous for the line “We must love one another or die,” but Auden disliked the line and the poem; he tinkered with both throughout his life, finally disavowing the poem entirely. He said it was “infected with an incurable dishonesty.”

In 1939, Auden was sailing to New York with his friend, writer Christopher Isherwood. They had known each other since they were eight years old and both attending boarding school at St. Edmund’s.

Auden landed at a somewhat shabby, funny-looking brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with other writers like Carson McCullers and Benjamin Britten. They called it the “February House” and it became a notorious haven for intellectuals, bohemians, and hangers-on, though Auden was very fussy about everyone’s writing time and instituted regular working hours before debauchery was allowed to start. He even made sure everyone had a good dinner every night, delighting in announcing, “We’ve got a roast and two veg, salad and savory, and there will be no political discussion.” Even striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee lived in the house for a time. She paid a good rent for her room in exchange for writing lessons. She began her book The G-String Murders (1941) at February House. And after a conversation with Auden, Carson McCullers started the book that would become The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951). Sometimes things got a little crazy: one boozy evening the writers raided the icebox and mistakenly ate cat food. Auden’s housemates called him “Uncle Wiz.”

W.H. Auden spent half of his 66 years living in New York City. He once said, “I adore new York, as it is the only city in which I can live and work quietly.” Auden won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection The Age of Anxiety (1948). His books include Letters from Iceland (1937), The Sea and the Mirror (1958), and Thank You, Fog (1974).