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 and nature that he had emphasised in the 1930s); his poems on these themes included "In Praise of Limestone" (1948) and "Memorial for the City" (1949). In 1949 Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera "The Rake's Progress", and later collaborated on two libretti for operas by Hans Werner Henze. Auden's first separate prose book was "The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea" (1950), based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature. Between 1949 and 1954 he worked on a sequence of seven Good Friday poems, titled "Horae