AUDEN, W.H. (1907-1973), British Poet

Wystan Hugh Auden was a friend of Christopher Isherwood, and both were influenced by the early 1930s gay movement in Germany. During that period, anti-Nazi cabaret performer Erika Mann asked him to marry her so she could obtain a British passport and escape from Nazi Germany. Auden consented. Soon thereafter, a friend of Mann's found herself in the same predicament, and approached Auden for help. "What else are buggers for?" asked Auden, and he found another gay friend to oblige. Auden's poem "Lullaby," published after his death in 1973 in a book entitled Thank You, Fog, is considered his coming-out poem. One stanza reads:

The old Greeks got it all wrong:

Narcissus is an oldie,

tamed by time, released at last

from lust for other bodies,

rational and reconciled.

For many years you envied

the hirsute, the he-man type.

No longer: now you fondle

your almost feminine flesh

with mettled satisfaction

imagining that you are

sinless and self-sufficient.