Quotes from W.H. Auden

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

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

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.

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?

Poetry makes nothing happen.

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

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.

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.

I write because I love to play with language.

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

To save your world, you asked this man to die:Would this man, could he see you now, asked why?

To make one, there must be two.

Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.

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

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. The love of language is either itself a poetic gift or a symptom of it.

The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.

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

We must love one another or die

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

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

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.