In 1941, W.H. Auden taught a course at the University of Michigan that required undergraduates to read roughly 6,000 pages of classic literature in a single semester. The reading list—32 works spanning Dante, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and Russian novels—has become legendary among literature students for its sheer ambition. But what makes this syllabus worth examining isn't just its difficulty: it's how Auden used literature to grapple with questions of fate, individual choice, and moral responsibility at a critical moment in world history.
The Man Behind the Reading List
W.H. Auden was born in York, England, in 1907 and studied at Oxford, where he joined circles of literary modernists including Stephen Spender and Cday Lewis. By the 1930s, he had become a leading voice in what critics called the Auden Generation—a cohort of writers who responded to fascism, social injustice, and spiritual crisis.
By 1939, Auden had moved to the United States, a move some biographers have characterized as an escape from Europe's political turmoil. In America, he returned to the Anglican faith and distanced himself from political dogmatism. His interests shifted toward theology, philosophy, and classical literature—themes that would define his Michigan syllabus.
The course he taught was called Fate and the Individual in European Literature. The title itself signals what Auden believed literature must do: grapple with questions of freedom and moral choice within the context of larger societal and spiritual structures.
How the Syllabus Works
Auden began the list with three works that immediately establish his central concern: Dante's Divine Comedy, Aeschylus's Agamemnon, and Sophocles's Antigone. These are very different texts, but they share a common thread—each confronts readers with individuals navigating destinies shaped by higher powers.
In Dante's pilgrim, the reader encounters spiritual determination through the hierarchy of hell, purgatory, and paradise. Agamemnon deals with personal motives trapped within familial and societal destiny. Antigone pits individual conscience against civic authority—a conflict Auden likely valued as an archetype of poetic conscience and ethical resistance.
The next item on the list, Horace's Odes, explores how acceptance of fate leads to poetic mastery over time and circumstance. Augustine's Confessions follows—this autobiographical work outlines his youth, sexual lusts, and eventual conversion to Christianity. Both writers respond to mortality differently, but Auden may have used them to explore the tension between self-will and divine sovereignty.
Shakespeare's Role in the Curriculum
Four Shakespeare plays appear on the list: Henry IV Part Two, Othello, Hamlet, and The Tempest. This is notable because King Lear—a more obvious choice for existential themes—does not appear. The absence is curious, but the four included works deal with questions of legitimacy, jealousy, reconciliation, manipulation, and existential will.
Othello considers the corrosive power of suspicion and how temptation manipulates individual agency. Hamlet struggles with action versus inaction under seemingly fated circumstances. For students who had already read Dante and Augustine, these plays would foreground the problem of individual action against the state—connecting directly to Antigone's conflict with Creon.
The Tempest offers Prospero's narrative of human control, political power, manipulation for good, and eventual forgiveness—a resolution that shapes the ultimate destiny of characters.
Philosophy and Poetry
After drama, Auden turns to philosophy. Pascal's Pensées appears next—a collection of spiritual and autobiographical fragments by the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician. The tension between reason and faith would have resonated with Auden's own exploration of human insignificance and the mystery of grace.
Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling follows—a brief work that poses the problem of teleological suspension of ethics. Students would have read Genesis Chapter 22, the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham's hesitation and obedience becomes a case study for how faith can supersede universal moral law, a major concern with individual ethics in the 20th century.
Baudelaire's Journals and Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer appear next—works about inner exile and creative suffering. These texts explore what it means to be a poet, how to live with the suffering of creation, and existential reflection on freedom and alienation.
The Modernists
The list includes Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell—a book of prophetic poems concerned with interdependence of opposing forces. This is one of the first works where the theme of the artist's role becomes foregrounded.
Goethe's Faust Part One appears—work about the quest for meaning, hunger for knowledge, and a figure who makes a pact with the devil. Auden may have emphasized the tension of individual striving within a pre-ordained cosmos.
Ibsen's Peer Gynt follows—a search for identity that can be read as a moral fable tracing evasion of responsibility and eventual reckoning.
The Russian Novels
Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazoff closes the list. This novel about faith, doubt, inherited guilt, and spiritual questions fits with earlier themes of reason versus belief. The three brothers represent three main responses to individual fate: hedonistic (Demetrius), philosophical (Aliosha), and spiritual (Ivan).
"The three brothers represent three of the main responses to individual fate in this course—the hedonistic, the philosophical, and the spiritual."
Auden may have cast Dmitri as a Horatian figure—someone who sees the day hedonistically—and used the Brothers Karamazoff to show how human freedom conflicts with cosmic order.
Why This Matters Now
The syllabus reflects what Auden believed about literature's civic and moral function. In 1941, Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and expanded into Eastern Europe. Systematic extermination was accelerating. The reading list wasn't just academic—it was a way of preparing students to face the very real challenges of their historical moment.
Auden's belief was clear: literature must grapple with questions of freedom and moral choice within larger societal and spiritual structures. The works he chose—spanning centuries from Dante to Dostoevsky—all confront individuals navigating destinies shaped by powers beyond themselves.
Bottom Line
This syllabus is remarkable not because it's difficult, but because it reveals Auden's conviction that great literature exists to wrestle with fate, mortality, and moral responsibility. His selection of 32 works creates a conversation across centuries about what it means to be an individual within larger communal realities—whether spiritual, societal, or political.
The biggest strength of this argument is its clarity about why these specific texts matter: they all force readers to confront the tension between fate and free will. The vulnerability is that without more context about how students actually responded to the reading, we lose the human dimension of what Auden was trying to accomplish in his classroom.