Six Poets by Alan Bennett

Author:Alan Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

from Five O’Clock Shadow

A haze of thunder hangs on the hospital rose-beds,

A doctors’ foursome out on the links is played,

Safe in her sitting-room Sister is putting her feet up:

This is the time of day when we feel betrayed.

Below the windows, loads of loving relations

Rev in the car park, changing gear at the bend,

Making for home and a nice big tea and the telly:

‘Well, we’ve done what we can. It can’t be long till the end.’

W. H. Auden

1907–1973

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, brought up in Birmingham, where his father was a physician, and educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, and Christ Church, Oxford. His student contemporaries included poets Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. After graduating in 1929, he spent several months in Berlin, often in the company of Christopher Isherwood, his future collaborator. His first book, Poems, was published in 1930 by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber and he later become associated with Rupert Doone’s Group Theatre, for which he wrote several plays, sometimes in collaboration with Isherwood. In January 1939 the two of them left England for the United States, where Auden became a citizen in 1946. His later works include The Age of Anxiety, Nones, The Shield of Achilles and Homage to Clio, and he also wrote texts for works by Benjamin Britten and (with Chester Kallman) the libretto for Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress. Elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1956, he died in Vienna in 1973.

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