W. H. Auden Quotes

The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish.

I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.

Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

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.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

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

Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.

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

All I have is a voice.

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are all on earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for, I can't imagine.