Th and the beginning of the 9th centures I. American literature and scholars

II.2 Life and works of Wystan Hugh Auden
W. H. Auden married only once in his life and that too was to help a friend, Erika Mann, get British Citizenship so that she could escape from the clutches of the Nazi Germans. The marriage remained unconsummated and the couple parted ways soon after.
After shifting to the US from Britain in 1939 he met the love of his life – Chester Kallman. Kallman too was a poet and the couple remained as lovers for the next two years. As Kallman feared commitment she eventually distanced herself from the relationship but remained a lifetime friend of Auden and shared a house with him till his demise on 29 September 1973.
Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February 21, 1907, in York, England. He was the last of three sons born to George and Constance Auden. His father was the medical officer for the city of Birmingham, England, and a psychologist (a person who studies the mind). His mother was a devoted Anglican (a member of the Church of England). The combination of religious and scientific themes are buried throughout Auden's work. The industrial area where he grew up shows up often in his adult poetry. Like many young boys in his city, he was interested in machines, mining, and metals and wanted to be a mining engineer. With both grandfathers being Anglican ministers, Auden once commented that if he had not become a poet he might have ended up as an Anglican bishop.
Another influential childhood experience was his time served as a choirboy. He states in his autobiographical sketch, A Certain World, "it was there that I acquired a sensitivity to language which I could not have acquired in any other way." He was educated at St. Edmund's preparatory school and at Oxford University. At Oxford fellow undergraduates Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, with Auden, formed the group called the Oxford Group or the "Auden Generation."
At school Auden was interested in science, but at Oxford he studied English. He disliked the Romantic (nineteenth-century emotional style of writing) poets Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and John Keats (1795–1821), whom he was inclined to refer to as "Kelly and Sheets." This break with the English post-Romantic tradition was important for his contemporaries. It is perhaps still more important that Auden was the first poet in English to use the imagery (language that creates a specific image) and sometimes the terminology (terms that are specific to a field) of clinical psychoanalysis (analysis and treatment of emotional disorders).