W. H. Auden Quotes (1907-1973)

“I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect. A few of these may have been put off by the first forty pages of the first chapter of the first volume in which the daily life of the hobbits is described; this is light comedy and light comedy is not Mr. Tolkien's forte. In most cases, however, the objection must go far deeper. I can only suppose that some people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light "escapist" reading. That a man like Mr. Tolkien, the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should lavish such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition, is, therefore, very shocking.”

“Cavafy is intrigued by the comic possibilities created by the indirect relation of poets to the world. While the man of action requires the presence of others here and now, for without the public he cannot act, the poet fabricates his poem in solitude.”

“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.”

“If often he was wrong and at times absurd To us he is no more a person Now but a climate of opinion.”

“From the beginning Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands.”

“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.”

“In writing his verse plays, Mr. Eliot took, I believe, the only possible line. Except at a few unusual moments, he kept the style Drap.”

“Baudelaire, to whom the sole pleasure in love was the knowledge of doing evil and who hoped to conquer solitude by inspiring universal horror and disgust.”

“The man writes with such genuine passion for the books he's discussing. With so many critics you feel they're writing so people will say they're good critics.”

“In a century of the symbolist , surreal , and absurd , W. H. Auden is essentially a poet of the reasonable .”

“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.”

“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.”

“Auden is something of an intellectual jackdaw, picking up bright pebbles of ideas so as to fit them into exciting conceptual patterns.”

“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.”

“As the poet W. H. Auden wrote: "Truth, like love and sleep, resents/Approaches that are too intense." I call this Auden's rule”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Auden was a religious poet in the nature of Herbert-is of this guy shambling along somewhere down lower Manhattan, almost looking like a bum in the way that he's going by, but containing within him a tremendous concern for others. All those big words. Auden could write them because he was a great poet. He could write Pity with a capital "P," and he could write Justice, and the Just. Maybe the authority to write of such emotions and qualities with a capital letter is gone now. But Auden was entitled to do it, and he believed in doing it.”