This move away from England, just as the Second World War was starting, was seen by many as a betrayal and his poetic reputation suffered briefly as a result. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrated to the United States in 1939. Although the “couple” never lived together, they remained friends and never bothered to divorce.
In 1935 Auden made a marriage of convenience to Erika Mann, lesbian daughter of the great German novelist Thomas Mann, in order to provide her with a British passport to escape the Third Reich. Here he spent three years and wrote some of his finest early love poems: including “This lunar beauty” “Lay your sleeping head, my love” “Fish in the unruffled lakes” and “Out on the lawn I lie in bed”. The most important of these, and where he was happiest, was the Downs School, near Great Malvern. On returning to England, he taught at two boys’ schools from 1930 to 1935. After Oxford he went to live for a year in Weimar Berlin, in whose tolerant atmosphere his homosexuality could be more openly expressed. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford University, but took only a third-class degree. Edmund’s School (Hindhead) in Surrey, and later Gresham’s School in Norfolk, but he returned to Birmingham for the holidays.
From the age of eight Auden was sent away to boarding schools, firstly at St. Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York and spent his early childhood in Harborne, Birmingham, where his father Dr George Auden was the school medical officer for Birmingham and Professor of Public Health at the University of Birmingham. He spent the first part of his life in the United Kingdom, but emigrated to the United States in 1939, becoming a U.S. Wystan Hugh Auden was an English poet, often cited as one of the most influential of the 20th century. “The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they’ve realised they can’t get away with it.”
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