Where is wh auden buried

Designed by. Developed by. Toggle navigation. Wystan Hugh Auden Writer and Poet. In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. He worked for the General Post Office Film Unit for a time and his verses in Night Mail are well known: This is the Night Mail crossing the Border, bringing the cheque and the postal order, letters for the rich, letters for the poor, the shop on the corner, the girl next door.

Further reading "W. A biography" by H. Whatever, it's a small village, I'm thinking I can make my way when I get there.

The train ride is in fact quite straightforward and one is dropped at the doorstep of a tiny, wooden train station in the type of friendly, sleepy suburban town that I like to catalogue in my head in case I ever run afoul of the law and am so committed to life that I need to disappear, fake amnesia, and reinvent myself as a barmaid ala Edward Norton in the movie the 25th Hour.

There is one bank. There is one bar. The bar is the only thing with anything going on. I gather my courage and ask where the Audenhaus is. I mean, I'm thinking it has to be the biggest thing that ever happened to this town, so they will all know where it is. First of all, I have to revert to my high school German, because in an Austrian town where the local hotspot is a place that looks like an old mini-Cocos where people still smoke indoors, their English isn't great, i.

I suppose here is where I give a begrudging shout out to my high school German teacher, despite dropping her class after two years because of general detestation in her direction. It takes a relay of four people before the elderly cook comes out of the kitchen and gives directions to a man who then maps them onto a piece of scratch paper for me. I would complain about their lack of sufficiency except that it was becoming painfully clear to me that I was lucky that anyone knew anything about my very favorite, and, arguably the best poet of the 20th century Kirchstettenians were too busy drinking beer and smoking indoors on their lunch breaks.

If Auden had lived here when he had written Musee des Beaux Arts I would have made the connection immediately. They "had somewhere to get to, and sailed calmly on. I was not. I was making this pilgrimage on foot. The locals were perplexed. The barman made me promise to come back and tell them if I was successful. I managed to say something about calling the polizei if I wasn't back in 4 hours. He clapped me on the back. Did I mention that this part of Austria is going through a heat wave?

A heat wave that came on so quickly that my hotel's air conditioning unit broke under the pressure of the cooling needs of their patrons. Sweating profusely at night in a Hilton. This comes into play 3 miles later in a forest. Wait for it.

Anyway, I'm told to make a right at the fire station, denoted with a star on said featured map, and then other vague arrows that I, again, very optimistically, assume will become clear along the path.

The street opens up to a scene which reminds me of nothing more strongly than the vista in the Shawshank Redemption in which Red hitchhikes up to the hay field in Maine where he finds money and directions to Mexico.

The Roman Catholic priest prayed in German, and was followed step by step by the chaplain of the British embassy who had driven up from Vienna to sound a note for Anglicanism to which Auden had returned after an agnostic youth. There was no oration. No words were uttered in his memory at the graveside, except a few sentences from a representative of the regional administration of Lower Austria who shyly recited a line from Rainer Maria Rilke.

Two years ago the proud village had put up a wooden sign saying Audenstrasse at the head of the lane leading to the little house which Auden had bought in and shared with his friend and collaborator, Chester Kallman.

Auden had his study in the loft, reached by an outside staircase. Auden, in full Wystan Hugh Auden, born February 21, , York, Yorkshire, England—died September 29, , Vienna, Austria , English-born poet and man of letters who achieved early fame in the s as a hero of the left during the Great Depression.

A softly poetic surname name, associated with poet W.