Editing W. H. Auden (section)

===Education===
[[File:St Eds Back.jpg|thumb|Auden's School at [[Hindhead]] in Surrey]]
Auden attended [[St Edmund's School, Hindhead]], Surrey, where he met [[Christopher Isherwood]], later famous in his own right as a novelist.<ref>{{cite book|first=Harry |last=Blamires|title=A Guide to twentieth century literature in English|year=1983|page= 130}}</ref> At thirteen he went to [[Gresham's School]] in [[Holt, Norfolk]]; there, in 1922, when his friend [[Robert Medley]] asked him if he wrote poetry, Auden first realised his vocation was to be a poet.<ref name="CarpenterNoPage"/> Soon after, he "discover(ed) that he (had) lost his faith" (through a gradual realisation that he had lost interest in religion, not through any decisive change of views).<ref>{{cite book |first=W. H. |last=Auden |title = Forewords and Afterwords |publisher = Random House |location = New York |year = 1973 |page = 517 |isbn = 978-0-394-48359-7}}</ref> In school productions of [[Shakespeare]], he played Katherina in ''[[The Taming of the Shrew]]'' in 1922,<ref>''The Times'', 5 July 1922 (Issue 43075), p. 12, col. D</ref> and [[Caliban]] in ''The Tempest'' in 1925, his last year at Gresham's.<ref>[[Hugh Wright (schoolmaster)|Wright, Hugh]], "Auden and Gresham's", ''Conference & Common Room'', Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer 2007.</ref> A review of his performance as Katherina noted that despite a poor wig, he had been able "to infuse considerable dignity into his passionate outbursts".<ref>[https://www.greshamsatwar.co.uk/Filename.ashx?systemFileName=GJ1922JUL.pdf#page=2 "The Taming of the Shrew"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230109070743/https://www.greshamsatwar.co.uk/Filename.ashx?systemFileName=GJ1922JUL.pdf#page=2 |date=9 January 2023 }}, ''The Gresham'', 29 July 1922. Retrieved 8 January 2023</ref>

His first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923.<ref name="JuveniliaNoPage">{{cite book |first = W. H. |last = Auden |editor-first = Katherine |editor-last = Bucknell |title = Juvenilia: Poems, 1922–1928 |publisher = Princeton University Press |location = Princeton |year = 1994 |isbn = 978-0-691-03415-7 |url = https://archive.org/details/juveniliapoems1900aude }}</ref> Auden later wrote a chapter on Gresham's for [[Graham Greene]]'s ''The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands'' (1934).<ref>{{cite book |first=W. H. |last=Auden |editor-first=Graham |editor-last=Greene |title=The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands |location=London |publisher=Jonathan Cape |year=1934 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WkJAAAAAIAAJ |access-date=24 May 2016 |archive-date=21 January 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230121032926/https://books.google.com/books?id=WkJAAAAAIAAJ |url-status=live }}</ref>

In 1925 he went up to [[Christ Church, Oxford]], with a scholarship in biology; he changed to English by his second year, and was introduced to Old English poetry through the lectures of [[J. R. R. Tolkien]]. Friends he met at Oxford include [[Cecil Day-Lewis]], [[Louis MacNeice]], and [[Stephen Spender]] – Auden and these three were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "[[Auden Group]]" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a [[British undergraduate degree classification|third-class]] degree.<ref name="CarpenterNoPage"/><ref name="DNB"/>

Auden was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925 by his fellow student [[A. S. T. Fisher]]. For the next few years Auden sent poems to Isherwood for comments and criticism; the two maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others. In 1935–39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.<ref>{{cite book | first=Richard |last=Davenport-Hines | title = Auden | author-link = Richard Davenport-Hines
 | publisher = Heinemann | location = London | year = 1995 | at = ch. 3 | isbn = 978-0-434-17507-9}}</ref>

From his Oxford years onward, Auden's friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident and shy except when certain of his welcome. He was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while living amidst physical disorder.<ref name="RDH-NoPage"/>