1907–1973 · Anglo-American poet · taught at Michigan and Swarthmore in the 1940s
Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) sailed from England to New York in January 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946, and for those years he was about the most talked-about poet in the country. He knew academic life from the lectern as well as the seat, teaching English at the University of Michigan in 1941–42 and at Swarthmore College from 1942 to 1945 — both after the professor quip was reported. He never claimed the line as his own invention; the Auden scholar Edward Mendelson found that Auden had apparently heard the joke and noted it in a journal in the autumn of 1939.