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).
John Bicknell Auden the second son of George Augustus Auden with Constance Rosalie née Bicknell (1869–1941) and was an older brother of the poet W. H. Auden. He was educated along with his younger brother Wystan at St Edmund's School, Hindhead, a Surrey prep school, after his father moved to teach public health at Birmingham. He excelled in French, English and the classics and being bespectactled earned the nickname of "dodo". He later studied at Marlborough College (1917 to 1922), and geology at Christ's College, Cambridge receiving a BA in 1936 after which he joined the Geological Survey of India, where he remained