English-born, American-naturalized poet whose technical command, intellectual range, and long public career made him, after Eliot, the dominant English-language poet of the mid-20th century. Auden emerged in the 1930s as the charismatic head of a generation of young left-wing British poets (the "Auden Group" — Spender, Day-Lewis, MacNeice), wrote himself into public consciousness with poems like Spain (1937) and September 1, 1939, and emigrated to New York in January 1939 — a move his British contemporaries never entirely forgave.
His move coincided with a deep religious and political turn. The confident Marxist-Freudian-Audenesque voice of the 1930s gave way, under the pressure of the war he had just left and his rediscovery of Christianity (via Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr), to a more chastened, more formally elaborate, more theologically literate poet. The long poems of this period — New Year Letter (1941), For the Time Being (1944), The Sea and the Mirror (1944), The Age of Anxiety (1947, which won the Pulitzer and gave its phrase to the decade) — are sustained meditations on what a thinking person can believe after totalitarianism and industrial war.
The later Auden, settled eventually in Austria and Oxford, wrote some of his most durable short lyrics (In Praise of Limestone, The Shield of Achilles, the Horae Canonicae) and a great deal of criticism collected in The Dyer's Hand (1962). His technical command — every meter, every stanza, pastiche, parody, occasion — is essentially unrivaled in 20th-century English verse. His private life, long obscured, is now better understood than he would have liked.