W.H. Auden Quotes

W.H. Auden Quotes

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Base words are uttered only by the base
And can for such at once be understood;
But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case
Where the most careful scrutiny is needed
To tell a voice that's genuinely good
From one that's base but merely has succeeded.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read
The hunter's waking thoughts.

If you want romance, fuck a journalist.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?

O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

Clear, unscalable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead,
From whose cold, cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.

Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise

If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.

There are good books which are only for adults.
There are no good books which are only for children.

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

I may want to sleep with Miss America, but I have no wish to hear her talk about herself and her family.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking. Dachau.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;
Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part.
They taught me to express my deep abhorrence
If I caught anyone preferring Art
To Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart.
I lived with crooks but seldom was molested;
The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

To make one, there must be two.

Small tyrants, threatened by big,
sincerely believe
they love liberty.

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

The friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake;

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

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