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).
Epilogue For W. H. Auden would later use the same rhyme scheme and metre (tetrameter couplets) in the last section of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (1939). In "Epilogue For W. H. Auden", MacNeice reviews the Iceland trip he and Auden had taken together in the summer of 1936, contrasting the 'lonely comfort' of his flat in Hampstead with the companionable discomfort of their weeks in Iceland. The poem mentions events that had occurred "down in Europe" while MacNeice and Auden were in Iceland, such as the fall of Seville (marking the start of the Spanish Civil War) and the Olympic Games in Berlin