Quotes About Auden

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in 'In Memory of WB Yeats': "You were silly like us.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

Intellectual disgraceStares from every human face,And the seas of pity lieLocked and frozen in each eye.

All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall; And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.

Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes — ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded.

Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.

Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence; Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part. They taught me to express my deep abhorrence If I caught anyone preferring Art To Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart. I lived with crooks but seldom was molested; The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.

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

Liberty to be and weep has never been sufficient: The winds surround our griefs, the unfenced sky To all our failures is a taciturn unsmiling witness.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table,' Jane said almost under her breath. 'Auden,' she explained, nodding to the book in Gabri's hand and flashing a smile that broke the unexpected, and unexplained, tension.

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

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

Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire; Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.

You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.