W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in 1907, grew up near Birmingham, and caught public attention in 1930 with his first book, Poems. Through the 1930s he wrote left-wing political plays with Christopher Isherwood, earning a reputation he later fled by moving to the United States in 1939. The shift marked a turn inward: his 1940s work explored religious themes in long poems like "For the Time Being", and his 1947 book The Age of Anxiety won the Pulitzer and gave the era its diagnostic phrase. He became an American citizen in 1946 while keeping his British passport, taught intermittently at universities, and served as Oxford's Professor of Poetry from 1956 to 1961. He died in 1973; decades later, films and broadcasts carried his lines - especially "Funeral Blues" - to millions who'd never read a poetry book.