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
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Evil
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Death
A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Love
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Thought, Evil, Reason
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
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Children
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Health, Medicine
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
Choice of attention – to pay attention to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Self-reliance, Decisions, Responsibility, Focus, Attention, Concentration
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Opera
Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Poetry
Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Honesty
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Leadership
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Death
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
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Science
Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are “shaggy dog” stories; they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Religion
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, Dance, Dance till you drop.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Dance
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that “faith” is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Faith
The Americans are violently oral. That’s why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all—isn’t respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: America
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Books, Literature
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
The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Faith, Belief
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Murder
Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Poetry
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Art, Writers, Authors & Writing
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Government, Age
Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Science
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Letters
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Life, Service
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Work
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided.
A continent for better or worse divided.
The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.
—W. H. Auden
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Music
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: Critics, Criticism
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
Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Goodness
Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Manners, Behavior
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: One liners, Water
To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word “Intellectual” suggests straight away. A man who’s untrue to his wife.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Intelligence
In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Worry
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