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 at fifteen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams, whom he had met in 1937, and partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life. After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Auden told the British embassy in Washington that he would return to the UK if needed. He was told that, among those his age (32), only qualified personnel were needed. In 1941–42 he taught English at the University of Michigan. He was called for the draft in the United