Childhood
Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February the 21st 1907. He was the youngest of three sons to Dr. George Auden and Constance Auden (born Bicknell). Due to a miscarriage there was a large gap between Auden and his two older brothers. As a result, Auden was most often in his mother’s company and not out playing with his brothers. Later in life Auden believed that, among other things, his sexuality was a result of him identifying with his mother. In an un-published poem he wrote, ‘Tommy did as his mother told him/Till his soul had split; / One half thought of angels/And the other of shit’[2]. On the other hand, Auden did not seem to mind being the youngest as he once said to his sister-in-law Sheila that, ‘as in fairy stories, being the youngest he was the most loved and was destined to find great treasure’[3]. In addition, he later wrote:

For I, after all, am the Fortunate One,
The Happy-Go-Lucky, the spoilt Third Son;[4]

At the age of eight, Auden was sent to St Edmund’s School. It was a very primitive way of living; cold baths, caning and even pupils that punished each other. Auden later said that his school was ‘a primitive tribe ruled by benevolent or malignant demons’[5]. It was also here that Auden first rebelled against authority. From an early age Auden took a clinical point of view on everything around him. This could be because of his father’s extensive library, where ‘scientific books stood side by side with works of poetry and fiction’[6]. As a young boy, Auden read not only stories but scientific books as well. To impress his fellow schoolmates, Auden used the knowledge acquired from the books in his father’s library.

In school Auden did well. The headmaster was strict but Auden later said the he owed ‘Ciddy’ a great deal[7]. A lot of the timetable was largely occupied with Greek and Latin, English was almost non-existent. Auden thought that studying the exact meaning of every word (when translating) helped him improve his use of English words. ‘Anybody who has spent so many hours of his youth translating into and out of two languages … learns something about his mother tongue which I do not think can be learned any other way. For instance, it includes the habit, whenever one uses a word, of automatically asking: “What is its exact meaning?”’[8].

It was at St Edmund’s Auden first met Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood would later make one of Auden’s best and long-lived friends. However, in school Isherwood remembered Auden ‘chiefly for his naughtiness, his insolence, his smirking tantalizing air of knowledge and exciting secrets.’[9].