W. H. Auden

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Few of W. H. Auden's friends adhered to his request to burn his letters after he died. Humphrey Carpenter's study quotes much of this correspondence for the first time, as well as drawing on other such rare material as Auden's unpublished verse, juvenilia, notebooks, and the journal the young poet kept during a stay in Berlin. This biography traces the artistic development of the most influential English poet of his generation, explaining the in-jokes in his early work, and the romantic crisis that inspired his last three long poems.