Auden focused consistently on the opportunities for wider discourse and immediate emotional impact offered by various kinds of performance. He started writing his first dramatic script on leaving Oxford at the age of twenty-one, and was collaborating on an operatic libretto in 1973, the year of his death. There was hardly a year when Auden was not working on some kind of performance text. In addition to stage plays and libretti, he experimented with cabaret, liturgical drama, Agitprop, pageant and declamatory verses, the masque and (rejected) lyrics for the musical comedy, 'The Man of La Mancha' (1963). As new forms of media appeared he immediately adopted them, writing radio plays, scripts for early documentary films and movie scenarios.

This cultivation of a public poetic voice paralleled T. S. Eliot, who also turned to drama to reach a wider, more popular audience, and experimented with ritual theatre. Whereas Eliot gave up the stage after The Elder Statesman in 1958, Auden’s involvement lasted throughout his life. Although he never managed to write anything as truly popular as Eliot’s ritualised drama of martyrdom, Murder in the Cathedral, Auden maintained his poetic agenda by turning in his later years to opera.