W H Auden is rated one of the greatest British poets of the twentieth century. Though his poems draw inspiration from all round the world, he was born here in York in 1907.

Plaque on W H Auden's birthplace in York

Wystan Hugh Auden’s poetry is most familiar to modern audiences through the popular “Funeral Blues” (you know it – it starts with the line “Stop all the clocks,”). His early work drew heavily on the dark international politics of the 1930s: after getting a third at Oxford Auden travelled to Weimar Berlin, yet to fall into the grip of the Nazi Party; and drove an ambulance – like Ernest Hemingway – in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1939 he moved to New York and from then until the end of his life spent most of his time between there and, in the summer, Europe, principally Italy and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.

He wrote prolifically in a range of styles from traditional ballads to modernism, and over a variety of themes – although Funeral Blues demonstrates his most common ones: love, death and the same bedsit miserablism that would later infuse the work of artists as diverse as John Betjeman and Morrissey.

But, while he was still a happy child, W H Auden lived at Number 54 Bootham in York, now inhabited by a firm of accountants and marked by a plaque. Auden’s father was a doctor; his mother a missionary and, according to Wikipedia, they practised a very “High Church” Anglicanism – effectively Catholicism in vernacular English and without pledging allegiance to the Pope.

By coincidence the local parish church, St Olaves on Marygate, is very much a High Anglican church today. Whether this has been the case for the past century I don’t know, but its tempting to think that the young W H Auden worshipped in – or at least paid lip service to – the same style of service in his York birthplace more than 100 years ago.