<P> In 1925 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, with a scholarship in biology; he switched to English by his second year . Friends he met at Oxford include Cecil Day - Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender; these four were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left - wing views . Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a third - class degree . </P> <P> Auden was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925 by his fellow student A.S.T. Fisher . For the next few years Auden sent poems to Isherwood for comments and criticism; the two maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others . In 1935--39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book . </P> <P> From his Oxford years onward, Auden's friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely . In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident and shy except when certain of his welcome . He was punctual in his habits, and obsessive about meeting deadlines, while choosing to live amidst physical disorder . </P> <P> In late 1928, Auden left Britain for nine months, going to Berlin, partly to rebel against English repressiveness . In Berlin, he first experienced the political and economic unrest that became one of his central subjects . </P>

English writer best known for poems of the sea john