Quotes About Auden

Il poeta, ripeto, è il mezzo di cui la lingua si serve per esistere. O, come ha detto il mio amato Auden, è colui in cui e per cui la lingua vive.

One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute-drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.

Near Weinheberplatz, Auden swerves down a side road with a smaller marker that says Audenstrasse. Only when the visitor remarks on it does Auden say, with unfeigned embarrassment: "The Gemeinde (township) really shouldn't have done it. I don't have the bad manners to tell them how much I detest it, but I don't have the nerve to thank them for it either. The name Hinterholz is so much better.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.

Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

nobody dared in those days to question such bullies, and the freedom that is more normal these days has come too late for these victims. Auden would have helped, because the whole message of his life and his poetry is the antithesis of cruelty and meanness of spirit.

A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

A sentence in Auden's Airman's Journal has always seemed very profound to me ---I haven't the book here so I can't quote it exactly, but something about time and space and how 'geography is a thousand times more important to modern man than history'---I always like to feel where I am geographically all the time, on the map,---but maybe that is something else again.

As I Walked Out One Evening," W. H. Auden expresses in a few lines what to me is the essence of the Phoenix Process: O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart. A heart made crooked through loss and change is a heart that can love the world and its less than perfect people.

well, as Auden wondered: Will it come like a change in the weather? Will its greeting be courteous or rough? Will it alter my life altogether? O tell me the truth about love.

As W.H. Auden pointed out, the Reaper takes the rolling in money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung. But that isn't where Auden starts his list. He starts with the innocent young.

Just an idea." He waved a thick hand. "I think Auden meant that whenever there's a gift there's a guilty secret, a thorn in the flesh. Both things are given at once, and the nature of one depends on the other.

I'm told that when Auden died, they found his Oxford all but clawed to pieces. That is the way a poet and his dictionary should come out.

I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.

Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself." —W. H. AUDEN

Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, 'Love each other or perish

Auden said, 'Love each other or perish.' 

Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, 'Love each other or perish.' 

Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself." —W. H. AUDEN, MORRIE'S FAVORITE POET

Of course Sartre and Beauvoir were not alone in being seduced by Communism. Many of the Auden generation, on both sides of the Channel, had become infatuated with the socialist 'paradise', and remained blind to its atrocities.