Quotes from W.H. Auden

Auden Letter to Lord Byron Banker or Landlord, booking clerk or pope, Whenever he's lost faith in choice and port, Whenever man sees the future without hope Whenever he endorses Hobbes report, The life of man is nasty, brutish, short, The Dragon rises from his garden border, And promises to set up Law and Order.

And how reliable can any truth be that is got By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.

Now, more than ever, we distinctly hear The dreadful shuffle of a murderous year And all our senses roaring as the Black Dog leaps upon the individual back.

Still his loud iniquity is still what only the Greatest of saints become-someone who dqes not lie : He because he cannot Stop the vivid present to think, they by having got Past reflection into A passionate obedience in time. We have our BoyMeets-Girl era of mirrors and muddle to work through, Without rest, without j oy. Therefore we love him because his judgements are so Frankly subjective that his abuse carries no Personal sting.

If there ever was a man of whom it could be said that he 'hungered and thirsted after righteousness,' it was Kafka.

When truly brothers, men don't sing in unison, but in harmony.

Expect no help from others, for who Talk sense to princes or refer to The scorpion in official speeches As they unveil some granite Progress Leading a child and holding a bunch Of lilies?

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." — W. H. Auden

Our whisper woke no clocks, We kissed and I was glad At everything you did, Indifferent to those Who sat with hostile eyes In pairs on every bed, Arms round each other's neck, Inert and vaguely sad.

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 sense of danger must not disappear: The way is certainly both short and steep, However gradual it looks from here; Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

He has never seen God, but, once or twice, he believes he has heard Him.

joining the crowd is the only thing all men can do.

Reason requires that I approve The light-bulb which I cannot love

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.

Whatever else it may or may not be, I want every poem I write to be a hymn in praise of the English language.

for the subject of the verb to-hunger is never a name : dear Adam and Eve had different bottoms, but the neotene who marches upright and can subtract reveals a belly like the serpent's with the same vulnerable look. Jew, Gentile or pigmy, he must get his calories before he can consider her profile or his own, attack you or play chess, and take what there is however hard to get down : then surely those in whose creed God is edible may call a fine omelette a Christian deed.

A poet […] may talk nonsense, but it will probably be interesting nonsense.

We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.

Life is fleeting and full of sorrow and no words can prevent the brave and the beautiful from dying or annihilate a grief. What poetry can do is transform the real world into an imaginary one which is godlike in its permanence and beauty, providing a picture of life which is worthy of imitation as far as it is possible.

Les 'hommes de bonne volonté', feel Their politics perhaps unreal And all they have believed untrue, Are tempted to surrender to The grand apocalyptic dream In which the persecutors scream

Nobody would call Miss Democracy anything but a plain girl, but when one compares her with the hags to whom millions are expected to pay court, she seems a very Helen.

Though language may be useless, for No words men write can stop the war Or measure up to the relief Of its immeasurable grief, Yet truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense, And often when the searcher stood Before the Oracle, it would Ignore his grown-up earnestness But not the child of his distress