W.H. Auden Quotes - Page 2

Clear, unscalable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead,
From whose cold, cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

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 it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

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

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

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.

Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise

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

Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.

There are good books which are only for adults.
There are no good books which are only for children.

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

I may want to sleep with Miss America, but I have no wish to hear her talk about herself and her family.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking. Dachau.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

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.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.