W.H. Auden

What We've Been Reading—August 2021

Our editors reflect on W. H. Auden and the limitations of postliberal theology. Continue Reading »

17 Aug 2021

Private Faces in Public Places

If the stature of a poet is measured by how well his words stick in the reader’s mind and refurbish our language, then W. H. Auden is one of the dominant English voices of the twentieth century. It is ironic that he came to “loathe” (his word) some of his best-remembered work. The most . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Feb 2020

The Hardest Course You’ll Ever Take

by Mark Bauerlein

Featuring Hillsdale College professor Eric Hutchinson on teaching a humanities course originally designed and taught by W. H. Auden in 1941. Continue Reading »

8 Feb 2019

The Ordinary Time Being

by Terence Sweeney

The Christian task is to imbue Ordinary Time with the love we saw in the stable—to make it not extra-ordinary, but holy in the most ordinary ways of all. Continue Reading »

17 Jan 2018

Auden and the Limits of Poetry

by Alan Jacobs

By the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden was the most famous and most widely imitated young poet in England. His verse was brilliant, ironic, often funny, wide-ranging in its reference—equally at home in the worlds of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and the technology of mining—and sometimes . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Aug 2001

To Read and to Live

by Alan Jacobs

The best way we can demonsrate our love for great books is ro use them in our search to discover “what we might do and . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Jun 1993