Auden and Christianity

Book excerpt: One of the twentieth century’s most important poets, W. H. Auden stands as an eloquent example of an individual within whom thought and faith not only coexist but indeed nourish each other. This book is the first to explore in detail how Auden’s religious faith helped him to come to terms with himself as an artist and as a man, despite his early disinterest in religion and his homosexuality. Auden and Christianity shows also how Auden’s Anglican faith informs, and is often the explicit subject of, his poetry and prose. Arthur Kirsch, a leading Auden scholar, discusses the poet’s boyhood religious experience and the works he wrote before emigrating to the United States as well as his formal return to the Anglican Communion at the beginning of World War II. Kirsch then focuses on Auden’s criticism and on neglected and underestimated works of the poet’s later years. Through insightful readings of Auden’s writings and biography, Kirsch documents that Auden’s faith and his religious doubt were the matrix of his work and life.