Both Wystan Auden's grandfathers were clergymen: his last poems were haikus that described or took the form of prayer. There is a rounded integrity about his Christian antecedents and his Christian end. Yet many of his admirers mistrust, dislike or minimise the religious elements in his poetry, and celebrate him for his intellectual power, the profusion of his ethical ideas and the rich diversity of his creative output. He was an encyclopaedist who liked to collect, classify and interpret large amounts of information, and strove to integrate natural phenomena, spiritual experiences, human history and intimate emotions into a system in which both body, spirit, feelings and intellect cohered. His poems drew ideas from the work of other poets as well as from novelists, historians, theologians, psychologists, philosophers, political scientists and anthropologists. He was the first great English poet to be born in the twentieth century, and the first whose work was profoundly influenced by psychoanalytical and Marxist theories. As a child he trusted machines better than people, and when young was numbered among the 'pylon poets' who celebrated new technology. Yet experiences during the 1930s nudged him back towards Christian faith, which became more explicit after he moved from England to live in the USA in 1939.