Adult Life
There were numerous people who influenced Auden’s work. In this essay I am going to discuss Christopher Isherwood, Chester Kallman, Rhoda Jaffe and J.R.R. Tolkien. To Auden they represented friendship, love, physical attraction and the relationship between a teacher and his student. I hope to give an insight as to how Auden’s poetry was affected by the various relationships he had during his adult life.

‘Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they where dishonest … A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained.’[10]

Christopher Isherwood
Christopher Isherwood and Auden got to know each other while they attended St Edmund’s School. However, after graduating they did not keep in touch and therefore did not meet until a mutual friend reunited them during the latter part of the 1920s. They developed a kind of ‘friends with benefits’ relationship. Throughout the 1930s, Auden and Isherwood, ‘whenever opportunity offered itself’[11], went to bed together. Immediately, Isherwood became Auden’s most trusted source for help and advice with his writing. Furthermore, Auden felt very insecure of himself and his poetry and Isherwood encouraged Auden to keep writing.

During the 1930s, Auden’s love poems were often melancholic and sad. This could be because, in the beginning, Auden (thought that he) was in love with Isherwood. However, Isherwood did not respond to Auden’s feelings quite as strongly. In March 1936, Auden wrote:

We kissed and I was glad
At everything you did,
…
What hidden form of guilt
Or what malignant doubt
Am I the victim of,
That you then, unabashed,
Did what I never wished,
Confessed another love[12]

Auden and Isherwood moved to New York together in 1939. There they lived together for some time before Isherwood moved to California. As a result, after this Isherwood and Auden rarely saw each other.

Chester Kallman
Auden met Chester Kallman shortly after moving to New York. Very soon they developed an intimate relationship. However, even from the beginning, their relationship was primarily intellectual. To Auden’s brother John, he wrote ‘it’s really happened after all these years. Mr Right has come into my life.’[13]. A noticeable change happened to Auden’s poetry around this time. Instead of as before, writing about unhappy love, filled with infidelity and insecurity, Auden started writing about comfortable, trusting love. With that trust and faith, he started revealing more of himself. In May 1939 he wrote:

For he is the one that I love to look on,
The acme of kindness and perfection.


He presses my hand and he says he loves me,
Which I find an admirable peculiarity[14]

By contrast, Auden was unsure of Kallman’s feelings for him. He could not understand why Kallman would be attracted to him, as he put in words:

…what reason have you to love me,
Who have neither the prettiness and moisture of youth…[15]

For the most part, Kallman and Auden’s relationship was not an intimate one. It is clear that what Auden loved was Kallman’s intellect. As expressed in this poem:

…the early poem
Of the flesh sub rosa
Has been known to grow
Now and then into the
Amor intellectu-
-alis…[16]

Auden thought of himself and Kallman as married. He wrote for a friends wedding (though it was secretly addressed to Kallman):

May this bed of marriage be
Symbol now of the rebirth
Asked of old humanity[17]

Furthermore, Auden wrote after he and Kallman had been together for two years: ‘I believe in your creative gift… I rely absolutely on your critical judgement… With my body, I worship yours.’[17] Kallman would become Auden’s lifelong companion; they shared apartments and houses until Auden’s death in 1973.

Rhoda Jaffe
Jaffe and Auden met during the latter part of the 1940s. Despite that Jaffe was already married they started an affair. While the affair was going on Jaffe was the “sexual-spouse” in Auden’s life, while Kallman was the “intellectual-spouse”. Jaffe and Auden’s relationship was, in other words, mostly physical. Auden dedicated the poem On and On and On (or Serenade) to Jaffe in a letter. The last lines demonstrate that what Auden felt was a physical attraction, not the intellectual as in previous relationships.

So my embodied love
Which, like most feeling, is
Half humbug and half true
Asks neighbourhood of you[19]

While having the affair with Jaffe Auden wrote The Age of Anxiety and the character Rosetta is partly based on Jaffe. In part two, Quant says to Rosetta:

Come, peregrine nymph, display your warm
Euphoric flanks in their full glory
Of liberal life; with luscious note
Smoothly sing the softer data of an
Unyielding universe, youth, money,
Liquor and love…[20]

This goes even further in expressing a physical, rather than intellectual, attraction. Despite Auden’s clear attraction to Jaffe in the beginning, the relationship eventually faded. His letters to her became less and less romantic, more as one friend to another. The relationship did not end badly though, Jaffe held no hard feelings towards Auden and they stayed friends.

J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien was Auden’s teacher when Auden attended Oxford. Auden greatly admired Tolkien, whom he also considered to be one of his favourite teachers. Moreover Auden took Tolkien’s Beowulf class which he greatly appreciated. Tolkien had a habit of starting the first class with shouting out the first words of Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon (‘Hweat!’[21]). This made a great impression on Auden who later said: ‘I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish.’[22]. Auden was right, as he during the 1930s was one of the leading poets to re-introduce Anglo-Saxon accentual meter to English poetry[23].

Tolkien and Auden remained friends for the rest of their lives (Tolkien died three weeks before Auden). Despite that they seldom got the chance to meet, they kept in touch through letters. In A Short Ode to a Philologist (Tolkien, though he’s more famous as a writer, was a philologist) Auden wrote:

No hero is immortal till he dies:
Nor is a tongue
But a lay of Beowulf’s language too can be sung,
Ignoble, maybe, to the young
…
For those who have learned to hope: a lot of us are grateful for
What J.R.R. Tolkien has done
As bard to Anglo-Saxon.[24]