One of the greatest poets of the XX century, Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York on 21st of February 1907 in a middle-class family. Passionate about literature, he went to Oxford university where he founded a literacy circle and he considerably expanded the horizon of his intellectual interests.
IN 1928 in Berlin, during the Republic of Weimar, he met Brecht’s work, which marked his education. In 1930, he published Poems in England, his first collection of poems followed by other works until 1937, when he participated in the Spanish civil war as an ambulance driver, being deeply troubled. In 1939, he moved to United States where he became an American citizen after the war. The first American decade was particularly rich in publications and recognitions and he culminated with the Pulitzer Prize for the Poem for Age of Anxiety. In New York, he met Chester Kallman, who was his partner for a long time, and who went to Italy with him in 1948, where they both stopped in Florence and Rome, before reaching the island of Ischia. They settled in the Pensione Nettuno, in Forio, where he wrote the poem Ischia. Then, they rent a house in order to spend spring and summer, while they would have spent winter autumn and winter in New York. In Forio, Auden has the International Bar of Maria Senese as a reference, where he sat at the same table on the left at the entrance. The literary persons, the artists and the musicians from every corner of the world used to meet there. They chose the island as a place to retreat during that same period. Auden and Kallman regularly returned to the island during the warm weather and every year until 1958, when they decided to move to Austria, in Kirchstetten. During their stay in Forio, Auden worked on different collections of poems, such as Petition in 1955. During that last summer, in 1958, he wrote Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno, his farewell to the island he had so loved. In 1957, he started teaching in Oxford. When he was awarded the Medal in 1967 for the literature in the USA, Auden published other collections: Thank you, fog, published posthumous in 1974. He had already died in Vienna on 29th of September 1973.
