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Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in 1907 and educated at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk, and Christ Church, Oxford. After leaving Oxford he taught school from 1930 to 1935 and later worked for a government film unit. His sympathies in the 1930s were with the Left, like those of many intellectuals of his age, and he went to Spain during the Civil War, intending to serve as an ambulance driver on the left-wing Republican side. To his …

…feeling the need to be part of a university community as a protection against loneliness. An uneven poet, a poet who in the opinion of some critics never quite fulfilled the enormous promise of his early work, Auden is nevertheless now generally recognized as one of the masters of twentieth-century English poetry, a thoughtful, seriously playful poet whom more than one critic has compared with Dryden in his combination of lively intelligence and immense craftsmanship.