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).
Thank You, Fog Thank You, Fog Thank You, Fog: last poems by W. H. Auden is a posthumous book of poems by W. H. Auden, published in 1974. The book contains poems written mostly in 1972 and 1973; after Auden's death in September 1973 it was prepared for publication by his literary executor Edward Mendelson, who also included an "antimasque" titled "The Entertainment of the Senses", written in 1973 by Auden and Chester Kallman as an interpolation in a planned production of James Shirley's masque "Cupid and Death" (1653); the antimasque was commissioned by the composer John Gardner. The shorter poems in the