W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was an Anglo-American poet known for his vast poetic work in many forms on many themes.

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

Quotations

I am beginning to lose patience
With my personal relations.
They are not deep
And they are not cheap

My head looks an egg upon a plate,
My nose is not too bad, but isn’t straight;
I have no proper eyebrows, and my eyes
Are far too close together to look nice.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another…

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

• Put the car away; when life fails
  What's the good of going to Wales?
  Here am I, here are you:
  But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
  • It's no use raising a shout (1929), first published in book form in Poems (1930)

• To ask the hard question is simple,
  The simple act of the confused will.
  • To Ask the Hard Question is Simple, first published in book form in Poems (1930)

• Let us honour if we can
  The vertical man
  Though we value none
  But the horizontal one.
  • Dedication to Christopher Isherwood, Poems (1930)

• I am beginning to lose patience
  With my personal relations.
  They are not deep
  And they are not cheap.
  • Case Histories (1930)

• Look, stranger, on this island now
  The leaping light for your delight discovers,
  Stand stable here
  And silent be,
  That through the channels of the ear
  May wander like a river
  The swaying sound of the sea.
  • Look, Stranger, on This Island Now (1936), first published in book form in Look, Stranger! (1936; US title On this Island)

• My head looks an egg upon a plate,
  My nose is not too bad, but isn’t straight;
  I have no proper eyebrows, and my eyes
  Are far too close together to look nice.
  • "Letter to Lord Byron" (1936)

• Acts of injustice done
  Between the setting and the rising sun
  In history lie like bones, each one.
  • The Ascent of F6, written with Christopher Isherwood, Act II, Scene V; quoted by Richard Adams in his novel Watership Down. (1936)

• Lay your sleeping head, my love
  Human on my faithless arm;
  Time and fevers burn away
  Individual beauty from
  Thoughtful children, and the grave
  Proves the child ephemeral;
  But in my arms till break of day
  Let the living creature lie:
  Mortal, guilty, but to me
  The entirely beautiful.
  • Lay your sleeping head, my love (1937), lines 1–2, written January 1937; also known as Lullaby.

• When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
  And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
  • Epitaph on a Tyrant (1939), lines 5–6

• Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
  And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
  • In Memory of Sigmund Freud (1939), lines 111–112

• 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.
  • Base words are uttered (1940), lines 1–5

• Unendowed with wealth or pity,
  Little birds with scarlet legs
  Sitting on their speckled eggs,
  Eye each flu-infected city.

  Altogether elsewhere, vast
  Herds of reindeer move across
  Miles and miles of golden moss,
  Silently and very fast.

  • The Fall of Rome (1947), lines 21–28

• In a national capital Mirabeau and his set
  Attacked mystery ; the packed galleries roared
  And history marched to the drums of a clear idea,
  The aim of the Rational City, quick to admire,
  Quick to tire.
  • Memorial for the City (1947)

• A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
  • Squares and Oblongs, in Poets at Work (1948), p. 170

• Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another; they might also ask themselves how much poetry of any period they can honestly say that they understand.
  • The Dyer's Hand (1955), in the BBC weekly The Listener (30 June 1955)

• How should we like it were stars to burn
  With a passion for us we could not return?
  If equal affection cannot be,
  Let the more loving one be me.
  • The More Loving One (1957)

• Marriage is rarely bliss
  But, surely it would be worse
  As particles to pelt
  At thousands of miles per sec
  About a universe
  In which a lover's kiss
  Would either not be felt
  Or break the loved one's neck.
  • After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics (1961), lines 9–16

• Thoughts of his own death,
  like the distant roll
  of thunder at a picnic.
  • Marginalia (1965–1968)

• 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 its desperate and slain,
  The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
  While drivel gushes from his lips.
  • "August 1968"

Autumn Song (1936)

• Now the leaves are falling fast,
  Nurse's flowers will not last;
  Nurses to their graves are gone,
  And the prams go rolling on.
  • Lines 1–4

• Cold, impossible, ahead
  Lifts the mountain's lovely head
  Whose white waterfall could bless
  Travellers in their last distress.
  • Lines 17–20
  • First published in book form in Look, Stranger! (1936; US title On this Island)

Funeral Blues (1936)

First version written 1936, final version 1938; also known as "Stop all the clocks" - Full text online

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

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 for ever: I was wrong.

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 woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Spain (1937)

Written March 1937

Our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin
Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.

Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

• And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
  Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us
  History the operator, the
  Organiser, Time the refreshing river."

  And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
  That shapes the individual belly and orders
  The private nocturnal terror:
  "Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

  "Raise the vast military empires of the shark
  And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
  Intervene. Descend as a dove or
  A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."

  • Lines 33–44

• On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
  Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
  On that tableland scored by rivers,
  Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

  Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
  To the medicine ad and the brochure of winter cruises
  Have become invading battalions;
  And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

  Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
  Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
  As the ambulance and the sandbag;
  Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

  • Lines 65–76

• To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
  The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
  Liberty's masterful shadow;
  To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

  The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
  To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
  The eager election of chairmen
  By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

  To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
  The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
  To-morrow the bicycle races
  Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

  • Lines 81–92

• The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
  We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
  History to the defeated
  May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
  • Lines 101–104

As I Walked Out One Evening (1937)

Written November 1937

• I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
  Till China and Africa meet,
  And the river jumps over the mountain
  And the salmon sing in the street,

  I'll love you till the ocean
  Is folded and hung up to dry
  And the seven stars go squawking
  Like geese about the sky.

• 'O plunge your hands in water,
  Plunge them in up to the wrist;
  Stare, stare in the basin
  And wonder what you've missed.

  'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
  The desert sighs in the bed,
  And the crack in the tea-cup opens
  A lane to the land of the dead.'

• Lines 37–44

Musée des Beaux Arts (1938)

Written December 1938

• About suffering they were never wrong,
  The Old Masters.
  • Lines 1–2

• They never forgot
  That even the most dreadful martyrdom must run its course
  Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
  Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
  Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
• Lines 9–13

In Memory of W. B. Yeats (1939)

By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice…

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Written February 1939

• By mourning tongues
  The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

  But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
  An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
  The provinces of his body revolted,
  The squares of his mind were empty,
  Silence invaded the suburbs.
  The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

  Now he is scattered over a hundred cities
  And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
  To find his happiness in another kind of wood
  And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
  The words of a dead man
  Are modified in the guts of the living.

  • Lines 10–23

• Follow, poet, follow right
  To the bottom of the night,
  With your unconstraining voice
  Still persuade us to rejoice;

  With the farming of a verse
  Make a vineyard of the curse,
  Sing of human unsuccess
  In a rapture of distress;

  In the deserts of the heart
  Let the healing fountains start,
  In the prison of his days
  Teach the free man how to praise.

  • Lines 66–77

September 1, 1939 (1939)

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives

Written September 1939

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse.

The error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

• I sit in one of the dives
  On Fifty-second Street
  Uncertain and afraid
  As the clever hopes expire
  Of a low dishonest decade:
  Waves of anger and fear
  Circulate over the bright
  And darkened lands of the earth,
  Obsessing our private lives;
  The unmentionable odour of death
  Offends the September night.
  • Lines 1–11

• I and the public know
  What all schoolchildren learn,
  Those to whom evil is done
  Do evil in return.
  • Lines 19–22

• Into this neutral air
  Where blind skyscrapers use
  Their full height to proclaim
  The strength of Collective Man,
  Each language pours its vain
  Competitive excuse.
  • Lines 34–39

• The windiest militant trash
  Important Persons shout
  Is not so crude as our wish.
  • Lines 56–58

• For the error bred in the bone
  Of each woman and each man
  Craves what it cannot have,
  Not universal love
  But to be loved alone.
  • Lines 62–66

• All I have is a voice
  To undo the folded lie,
  The romantic lie in the brain
  Of the sensual man-in-the-street
  And the lie of Authority
  Whose buildings grope the sky:
  There is no such thing as the State
  And no one exists alone;
  Hunger allows no choice
  To the citizen or the police;
  We must love one another or die.
  • Lines 78–88; for a 1955 anthology text the poet changed this line to "We must love one another and die" to avoid what he regarded as a falsehood in the original.

• Defenceless under the night
  Our world in stupor lies;
  Yet, dotted everywhere,
  Ironic points of light
  Flash out wherever the Just
  Exchange their messages:
  May I, composed like them
  Of Eros and of dust,
  Beleaguered by the same
  Negation and despair,
  Show an affirming flame.
  • Lines 89–99

The Age of Anxiety (1948)

• Let us then
  Consider rather the incessant Now of
  The traveler through time, his tired mind
  Biased towards bigness since his body must
  Exaggerate to exist, possessed by hope...
  • Prologue

• 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.
  • Epilogue

The Shield of Achilles (1952)

A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

• A million eyes, a million boots in line,
  Without expression, waiting for a sign.

• Out of the air a voice without a face
  Proved by statistics that some cause was just
  In tones as dry and level as the place:
  No one was cheered and nothing was discussed...

• A crowd of ordinary decent folk
  Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
  As three pale figures were led forth and bound
  To three posts driven upright in the ground.

• The mass and majesty of this world, all
  That carries weight and always weighs the same
  Lay in the hands of others; they were small
  And could not hope for help and no help came:
  What their foes like to do was done, their shame
  Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
  And died as men before their bodies died.

• A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
  Loitered about that vacancy: a bird
  Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
  That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
  Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
  Of any world where promises were kept
  Or one could weep because another wept.

• The thin-lipped armorer,
  Hephaestos, hobbled away,
  Thetis of the shining breasts
  Cried out in dismay
  At what the god had wrought
  To please her son, the strong
  Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
  Who would not live long.

The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Vintage, ISBN 0-679-72484-2

Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.

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

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

It is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.

If, in order to hear some music, a man has to wait for six months and then walk twenty miles, it is easy to tell whether the words, "I should like to hear some music," mean what they appear to mean, or merely, "At this moment I should like to forget myself."

• The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
  • "Reading", p. 6

• In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments.
  • "Reading", p. 9

• Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
  • "Reading", p. 10

• One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
  • "Reading", p. 11

• At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.
  • "Reading", p. 12

• No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
  • "Writing", p. 14

• In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.
  • "Writing", p. 17

• The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor — dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
  • "Writing", p. 22

• The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing? But nobody says this. The self-appointed unqualified nurse says: "You are to sing the patient a song which will make him believe that I, and I alone, can cure him. If you can't or won't, I shall confiscate your passport and send you to the mines." And the poor patient in his delirium cries: "Please sing me a song which will give me sweet dreams instead of nightmares. If you succeed, I will give you a penthouse in New York or a ranch in Arizona."
  • "Writing", p. 27

• Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods.
  • "The Virgin & The Dynamo", p. 62

• When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
  • "The Poet & The City", p. 81

• What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.
  • "The Poet & The City", p. 83 (frequently misquoted, with Auden's "offer" mistakenly copied as "offers")

• All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
  • "The Poet & The City", p. 84

• Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
  • "Hic et Ille", p. 96

• When I consider others I can easily believe that their bodies express their personalities and that the two are inseparable. But it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.
  • "Hic et Ille", p. 104

• The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.
  • "Hic et Ille", p. 104

• Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
  • "Hic et Ille", p. 105

• To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged.
  • "The Guilty Vicarage", p. 157

• The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
  • "The Prince's Dog", p. 201

• All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: "I refuse to be what I am."
  • "Interlude: West's Disease", p. 241

• All pity is self-pity.
  • "Interlude: West's Disease", p. 243

• In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement, it was also easier to tell a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some music, a man has to wait for six months and then walk twenty miles, it is easy to tell whether the words, "I should like to hear some music," mean what they appear to mean, or merely, "At this moment I should like to forget myself." When all he has to do is press a switch, it is more difficult. He may easily come to believe that wishes can come true.
  • Interlude: West's Disease", p. 245

• To some degree every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
  • "American Poetry", p. 367

• Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
  • "Notes on the Comic", p. 372

• A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.
  • "Don Juan", p. 403

• Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more of a realm of mere human behavior. The contemporary dramatist has lost his natural subject.
  • "Genius & Apostle", p. 435

• When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
  • "Postscript: Christianity & Art", p. 461

• No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
  • "Notes on Music and Opera", p. 472

Moon Landing (1969)

From the moment the first flint was flaked this landing was merely a matter of time.

Written August 1969

A grand gesture. But what does it period?

What does it osse? We were always adroiter

with objects than lives, and more facile

at courage than kindness: from the moment

the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam's,
still don't fit us exactly, modern
only in this—our lack of decorum.

• Lines 10–16

A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970)

Viking Press, 1st edition, ISBN 0-670-20994-5

• Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
  • "Tyranny”

• All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.
  • "Hell"

Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Vintage Books, ISBN 0-394-71887-9

The idea of a sacrificial victim is not new; but that it should be the victim who chooses to be sacrificed, and the sacrificers who deny that any sacrifice has been made, is very new.

Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

Machines have no political opinions, but they have profound political effects.

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them — the one, in fact, which is not a mask.

One can only blaspheme if one believes.

• A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
  • "The Greeks and Us", p. 15

• The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
  • "The Greeks and Us", p. 21

• Man … always acts either self-loving, just for the hell of it, or God-loving, just for the heaven of it; his reasons, his appetites are secondary motivations. Man chooses either life or death, but he chooses; everything he does, from going to the toilet to mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of himself.
  Lastly by the classical apotheosis of Man-God, Augustine opposes the Christian belief in Jesus Christ, the God-Man. The former is a Hercules who compels recognition by the great deeds he does in establishing for the common people in the law, order and prosperity they cannot establish for themselves, by his manifestation of superior power; the latter reveals to fallen man that God is love by suffering, i.e. by refusing to compel recognition, choosing instead to be a victim of man's self-love. The idea of a sacrificial victim is not new; but that it should be the victim who chooses to be sacrificed, and the sacrificers who deny that any sacrifice has been made, is very new.
  • Assessing St. Augustine's perspectives in "Augustus to Augustine", p. 37

• The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
  • "The Protestant Mystics", p. 51

• Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.
  • "The Protestant Mystics", p. 52

• The mystics themselves do not seem to have believed their physical and mental sufferings to be a sign of grace, but it is unfortunate that it is precisely physical manifestations which appeal most to the religiosity of the mob. A woman might spend twenty years nursing lepers without having any notice taken of her, but let her once exhibit the stigmata or live for long periods on nothing but the Host and water, and in no time the crowd will be clamoring for her beatification.
  • "The Protestant Mystics", p. 72

• In the late Middle Ages there were, no doubt, many persons in monasteries and convents who had no business there and should have been out in the world earning an honest living, but today it may very well be that there are many persons trying to earn a living in the world and driven by failure into mental homes whose true home would be the cloister.
  • "The Protestant Mystics", p. 73

• He suffers from one great literary defect, which is often found in lonely geniuses: he never knows when to stop. Lonely people are apt to fall in love with the sound of their own voice, as Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, not out of conceit but out of despair of finding another who will listen and respond.
  • On Søren Kierkegaard, in "A Knight of Doleful Countenance", p. 192

• I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.
  • "The Greatest of the Monsters", p. 247

• A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business.
  • "A Poet of the Actual", p. 265

• Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
  • "A Poet of the Actual", p. 266

• Machines have no political opinions, but they have profound political effects. They demand a strict regimentation of time, and, by abolishing the need for manual skill, have transformed the majority of the population from workers into laborers. There are, that is to say, fewer and fewer jobs which a man can find a pride and satisfaction in doing well, more and more which have no interest in themselves and can be valued only for the money they provide.
  • "A Russian Aesthete", p. 279

• In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.
  The virtue of patriotism has been extolled most loudly and publicly by nations that are in the process of conquering others, by the Roman, for example, in the first century B.C., the French in the 1790s, the English in the nineteenth century, and the Germans in the first half of the twentieth. To such people, love of one's country involves denying the right of others, of the Gauls, the Italians, the Indians, the Poles, to love theirs.
  • "C.P. Cavafy", p. 341

• Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
  • "Un Homme d'Esprit", p. 361

• Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them — the one, in fact, which is not a mask.
  • "One of the Family", p. 369

• Most people are even less original in their dreaming than in their waking life; their dreams are more monotonous than their thoughts and oddly enough, more literary.
  • "Walter de la Mare", p. 393

• In all technologically "advanced" countries, fashion has replaced tradition, so that involuntary membership in a society can no longer provide a feeling of community.
  • "Lame Shadows", p. 410

• It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
  • "Markings", p. 438

• In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.
  • "The Justice of Dame Kind", p. 464

• One can only blaspheme if one believes.
  • "Concerning the Unpredictable", p. 472

• Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
  • "As It Seemed to Us", p. 498

Paris Review interview (1972)

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

1972 interview in Paris Review "Writers at Work" interviews, 4th series [[[Special:BookSources/0-14-00-4543-0|ISBN 0-14-00-4543-0]]], p. 247

• Normally, when one passes someone on the street who is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With a photo there's no human decision; you're not there; you can't turn away; you simply gape. It's a form of voyeurism.
  • p. 247

• It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."
  • p. 250

• A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
  • p. 251

• I never write when I'm drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn't like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn't like slavish devotion — then she lies.
  • p. 254

• I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
  • p. 266

Paul Bunyan

• Every day America's destroyed and re-created,
  America is what you do,
  America is I and you,
  America is what you choose to make it.

Reported quotations

• A real book reads us.
  • Reported by Lionel Trilling in "On the Modern Element in Modern Literature", Partisan Review, January-February 1961, p. 15 (reprinted in Trilling's Beyond Culture, 1965): Trilling wrote: "taking the cue of W. H. Auden's remark that a real book reads us, I have been read by Eliot's poems...".
  • More commonly reported as "a real book is not one that we read but one that reads us". This paraphrase of Trilling's reported quotation first appeared in a review by Robie Macauley of Trilling's Beyond Culture in the New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1965, p. 38: "I must borrow a phrase from Mr. Trilling (who borrows it from W. H. Auden): a real book is not one that we read but one that reads us." The same version, attributed to Auden, appears in Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips & Quotes (1968), p. 87 (with a comma after "we read"). There is no evidence that Auden ever wrote or said this version of the phrase.
  • Other variations (e.g. "not one that's read" for "not one that we read") seem to be misrecollections of Robie Macaulay's paraphrase.

Misattributed

• Now is the age of anxiety.
  • Widely attributed online to Auden, this phrase does not occur anywhere in his writings. It is apparently a confused recollection of the title of his long poem The Age of Anxiety (1947). (The phrase "age of anxiety" occurs only in the title of the poem, not in the text, nor in anything else by Auden.)

• We are all on earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for, I can't imagine.
  • Often cited as by Auden without attribution, this quotation has been traced to John Foster Hall (1867-1945), an English comedian known as the Reverend Vivian Foster, Vicar of Mirth. Full history with sound recording

• A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
  • Often attributed to Auden, but he was repeating an anonymous joke; he did not claim to have originated it. See "Who Wrote Auden's Definition of a Professor?"

• Minus times minus equals plus,
  The reason for this we need not discuss.
  • As stated in "The Poet Himself" by Paul Fussell, in The New York Times (4 October 1981), these lines were a "math mnemonic" which Auden "had to memorize as a child."

• Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
  • A quotation from Igor Stravinsky, not Auden. Cited as Auden's through a misreading of a paragraph in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, by Robert Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 6. (The antecedent of "he" is unmistakably "Mr. S." in Craft's sentence: "He also makes a marvelous remark to the effect that 'Music is the best means we have of digesting time'"; and in the sentence that follows "he" is again Stravinsky, not Auden.)

• Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
  • A misquotation of a haiku by Auden found elsewhere on this page ("Thoughts of his own death" etc.)

• No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
  • Not by Auden; sources from the 1980s attribute it to the Rev. W. A. Nance (the name seems to have been confused with Auden's).

• Water is the soul of the earth.
  • Not by Auden; an unverified online source attributes it to the nineteenth-century poet Lucy Larcom: [1]

Quotes about Auden

• In a century of the symbolist , surreal , and absurd , W. H. Auden is essentially a poet of the reasonable .
  • James D. Brophy, W. H. Auden, Columbia University Press, 1970. Quoted in Pepper, Frank S., Dictionary of Biographical Quotations, Sphere Reference, 1985, (p.20)

• Spain is a hundred line poem from Auden; it is good medium Auden in a good cause — the Spanish Medical Aid. The Marxian theory of history does not go very happily into verse, but the conclusion is very fine.
  • Cyril Connolly, "To-Day the Struggle", in New Statesman & Nation, 5th June 1937. Reprinted in Valentine Cunningham, Spanish Front : Writers on the Civil War. Oxford University Press, 1986 (p.325).

• We have one poet of genius in Auden who is able to write prolifically, carelessly and exquisitely, nor does he seem to have to pay any price for his inspiration. It is as if he worked under the influence of some mysterious drug, which presents him with a private vision, a mastery of form and vocabulary.
  • Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938. Quoted in Frank S. Pepper, Handbook of 20th century quotations, London, Sphere Books, 1984. (p. 33).

• The poet Auden said, "Thousands have lived without love; none without water." Ninety-seven percent of Earth's water is ocean. No blue, no green. If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system.
  • Sylvia Earle "My wish: Protect our oceans" (2009 TED talk)

• Auden is something of an intellectual jackdaw, picking up bright pebbles of ideas so as to fit them into exciting conceptual patterns.
  • Richard Hoggart, W. H. Auden. British Council and the National Book League (p. 8). Also quoted in Justin Wintle and Richard Kenin, The Dictionary of Biographical Quotation of British and American subjects. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 (p.36).

• W.H. Auden's poem, Spain, is fit to stand beside great predecessors in its moving, yet serene expression of contemporary feeling towards the heart-rending events of the political world. The theme of the poem lies in the comparison between the secular achievements of the past and the hope which is possible for the future with the horrors of the present and the sacrifices which perhaps it demands from those of this generation who think and feel rightly.
  • John Maynard Keynes, "British Foreign Policy", New Statesman, 10th July 1937. Reprinted in Stephen Howe, Lines of dissent: writings from the New statesman, 1913-1988, Verso Books, 1988.

• As the poet W. H. Auden wrote: "Truth, like love and sleep, resents/Approaches that are too intense." I call this Auden's rule
  • Bessel van der Kolk The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

• His satire has been criticized at times as irresponsible : this is to misunderstand its motive and aim : in so far as it proceeds from the life of one social class, a class which has lost its responsibility and civilizing impetus, the terms of this satire are bound to be superficially irresponsible. But no contemporary writing shows so clearly the revulsion of the artist from a society which can no longer support him, his need to identify himself with a class that can provide for his imagination.
  • Cecil Day Lewis on Auden, New Verse magazine, November 1937. Also quoted in Skelton, Robin, Poetry of the Thirties, Penguin Books, 1963.

• He is all ice and woodenfaced acrobatics.
  • Wyndham Lewis on Auden, in Blasting and Bombardiering, 1937. Also quoted in Justin Wintle and Richard Kenin, The Dictionary of Biographical Quotation of British and American subjects. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 (p.37).

• Wystan Auden read us some of his new poem in the evening...I follow Auden in his derision of patriotism, class distinctions, comfort, and all the ineptitudes of the middle-classes. But when he also derides the other soft little harmless things which make my life comfortable, I feel a chill autumn wind. I feel that were I a communist the type of person whom I should most wish to attack would not be the millionaire or the imperialist, but the soft, reasonable, tolerant, secure, self-satisfied intellectuals like Vita and myself. A man like Auden with his fierce repudiation of half-way houses and his gentle integrity makes one feel terribly discontented with one’s own smug successfulness. I go to bed feeling terribly Edwardian and back-number, and yet, thank God, delighted that people like Wystan Auden should actually exist.
  • Harold Nicolson, Diary, 4th August 1933. Quoted in Wintle, Justin, and Kenin, Richard, The Dictionary of Biographical Quotation of British and American subjects. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 (p.37). Also quoted in Winstone, Ruth, Events, Dear Boy, Events: A Political Diary of Britain 1921-2010, Profile Books, 2012.

• I really wrote in his (Auden's) style. I was crazy about him. I loved his poems so much that I was using this British language all the time—I was saying trousers and subaltern and things like that. You understand I was a Bronx kid. We went through a few poems, and he kept asking me, do you really talk like that? And I kept saying, Oh yeah, well, sometimes. That was the great thing I learned from Auden: that you’d better talk your own language. Then I asked him what young writers now ask me—and I always tell them this story—I said to Auden, Well, do you think I should keep writing? He laughed and then became very solemn. If you’re a writer, he said, you’ll keep writing no matter what. That’s not a question a writer should ask. Something like that, not exactly, but close.
  • Grace Paley, Interview with The Paris Review (1992)

• he proclaimed so diminished a scope for poetry, including mine. I had little use for his beginnings and middles. Yet he was one of the masters.
  • Adrienne Rich What Is Found There (2003)

• Muriel Rukeyser was a breakaway from the irony and fatalism of modernists like Eliot and Auden.
  • Adrienne Rich A Human Eye (2009)

• In terms of English and American poets, it would be quite just to call this The Age of Auden. Not only because Auden was such a dominant and successful poet, but because he went through all the contradictory ideological phases, from Marx to God. He really is representative in that sense.
  • Karl Shapiro, in "Karl Shapiro, The Art of Poetry No. 36", interviewed by Robert Phillips in Paris Review No. 99 (Spring 1986)

• I sometimes think of Auden's poetry as a hygiene, a knowledge and practice, based on a brilliantly prejudiced analysis of contemporary disorders, relating to the preservation and promotion of health, a sanitary science and a flusher of melancholies. I sometimes think of his poetry as a great war, admire intensely the mature, religious, and logical fighter, and deprecate the boy bushranger.
  • Dylan Thomas, New Verse magazine, November 1937. Also quoted in Skelton, Robin, Poetry of the Thirties, Penguin Books, 1963, and Hampson, Robert, and Barry, Peter, New British Poetries :The Scope of the Possible, Manchester University Press, 1995.

External links

• Fourteen poems by Auden (Academy of American Poets site).
• Auden reads "On Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics".
• "W. H. Auden, The Art of Poetry No. 17" by Michael Newman in Paris Review (Spring 1974)
• W. H. Auden at Swarthmore.
• Back issues of The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter.