Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–73,) known as W. H. Auden, was an English-born American poet. He was one of the major poets of the 20th century—he published more than 400 poems, essays, plays, and opera libretti.
Auden’s first volume of poetry, Poems (1930,) written while he was still an undergraduate, established him as the leading voice in a group of young left-wing writers, which included Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Christopher Isherwood. His The Orators (1932,) a volume consisting of odes, parodies of school speeches and sermons, and the surreal “Journal of an Airman,” provided a barrage of satire against England.
Auden traveled widely during the subsequent years. He and Isherwood worked together on a series of plays, such as The Ascent of F6 (1936.) Auden joined the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and wrote Spain (1937.) In 1939, he emigrated to New York, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1946. His writings on religion continued to evolve—his work became increasingly overshadowed by his Christian belief and an existential search for redemption. His long contemplative works include The Double Man (1941,) The Sea and the Mirror (1944,) For the Time Being (1944,) and The Age of Anxiety (1947,) for which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.
From 1956–61, Auden was a professor of poetry at Oxford University. His poetry adopts many tones, often using colloquial and everyday language. Auden’s Collected Poems was published in 1976.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by W. H. Auden
Healing, Papa would tell me, “is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”
—W. H. Auden
Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Singing
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Past, History
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Opera
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Death
A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Doctors
My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Politics
You know there are no secrets in America. It’s quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Secrets
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: One liners, Water
Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Goodness
How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Mathematics
The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Criticism, Critics
God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: God
A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Education, Teaching, Teachers
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Death
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work “comes” to him.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Creativity
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Wishes
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Evil, Reason, Thought
The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Politics
Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Honor
Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Poetry
What people don’t realize is that intimacy has its conventions as well as ordinary social intercourse. There are three cardinal rules—don’t take somebody else’s boyfriend unless you’ve been specifically invited to do so, don’t take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Men & Women
To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Happiness
Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Poetry
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Reading, Books
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Theater
It is… axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Kindness
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Music
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Legacy, Autobiography
In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning. In life, the loser’s score is always zero.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Life
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