He helped Auden with introductions to editors. The somewhat older Isherwood was already well introduced in the English publishing and art world. The two men had known each other slightly at Oxford University. In Berlin, he began an intensive literary and on-again-off-again sexual relationship with Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986). The Berlin of Weimar Germany was more tolerant of open homosexuality than was the England of his youth. In 1930, shortly after publishing his first book of poems, he went to live in Berlin. The one constant running through his life and coloring his more personal writings was a homosexual bonding to men that he hoped would last and never did as reflected in his poem ItвЂ™s No Use raising a Shout: ItвЂ™s no use raising a shout.

Finally there is the writer largely of book reviews and short literary essays living much of the time in Italy and Austria until his death in 1973 in Vienna. Then, there is the poet living in the USA during the 1940s who became a US citizen and became primarily concerned with what was called at the time вЂњneo-orthodox ProtestantвЂќ theology. Auden (he rarely used his first names) of the 1930s, the English political poet who reported on the Spanish civil war and the start of the Sino-Japanese war in 1939. Each group celebrates half of his poetic life and rather tries to forget about the other half, seeing one part of his life as the perfect image of the modern poet who lost his way.

Wystan Hugh Auden, whose birth 100 years ago in 1907, is marked this year by two separate groups of poetry readers.

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