W. H. Auden to spend his summers with Auden in Austria. In 1972, Auden moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage, while he continued to spend summers in Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973, a few hours after giving a reading of his poems at the Austrian Society for Literature; his death occurred at the Altenburgerhof Hotel where he was staying overnight before his intended return to Oxford the next day. He was buried in Kirchstetten. Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length).
W. H. Auden Canonicae", an encyclopaedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history, focused on the irreversible act of murder; the poem was also a study in cyclical and linear ideas of time. While writing this, he also wrote "Bucolics," a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to nature. Both sequences appeared in his next book, "The Shield of Achilles" (1955), with other short poems, including the book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier". In 1955–56 Auden wrote a group of poems about "history", the term he used to mean the set of unique events made by