"At any one time there must be five or six supremely intelligent people on the earth," The New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss wrote shortly after Auden's death, "Auden was one of them".[113] Auden's family roots were strongly tied to the West Midlands[114] and he grew up from the age of six months in the Birmingham area, first in Solihull and then in Harborne, the son of George Augustus Auden, the Schools Medical Officer for Birmingham City Council.