Wystan Hugh Auden was born in 1907 in York, England, the youngest of three sons of a strict psychologist father and a devoted Anglican mother. He would spend most of his childhood in Birmingham. A student (formally or informally) of many of the major poets writing in English in the early 1900s, including W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, Auden would go on to become one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
As an upper-class white man in 1920s England, Auden attended preparatory school, forming a few significant relationships, including that with the visiting Christopher Isherwood, who would become his friend and most likely lover. At Oxford University, Auden changed his major...
