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 writing in a 'holiday' spirit, its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing every day more powerful and a world-war more inevitable. Indeed, the prologue to that war, the Spanish Civil War, broke out while we were there." Edna Longley, in her study of Louis MacNeice, comments that "Epilogue For W. H. Auden" is "MacNeice's most integrated use of Iceland as an imaginative focus, perhaps because retrospect has clarified the tension defined in 'a fancy turn, you know / Sandwiched in a graver show'." Michael O'Neill and Gareth Reeves