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.
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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
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Genius
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
Criticism should be a casual conversation.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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: Belief, Faith
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Legacy, Autobiography
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: Behavior, Manners
Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Poetry
We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our natural attitude toward the other is one of either indifference or hostility.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Love
A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.
—W. H. Auden
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility—the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Face, Explanation, Faces
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Death
In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Satisfaction
It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Foresight, Talent
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
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
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Reason, Thought, Evil
No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Leadership
All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Sin
Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Parenting
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
It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Leisure, Rest
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Music
Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
—W. H. Auden
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Faces, Face
Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Goodness
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
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Quotations
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Laughter, Love, Humor
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
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