W.H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet, best known for love poems such as "Funeral Blues," poems on political and social themes such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles," poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." He grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent (or public) schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. After a few months in Berlin in 1928–29 he spent five years (1930–35) teaching in English public schools, then travelled to Iceland and China in order to write books about his journeys. In 1939 he moved to the United States and became an American citizen in 1946. He taught from 1941 through 1945 in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s. From 1947 through 1957 he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia; from 1958 until the end of his life he wintered in New York (in Oxford in 1972–73) and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.
Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide public attention at the age of twenty-three, in 1930, with his first book, Poems, followed in 1932 by
The Orators
. Three plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935–38 built his reputation as a left-wing political writer. Auden moved to the United States partly to escape this reputation, and his work in the 1940s, including the long poems For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror, focused on religious themes. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his 1947 long poem The Age of Anxiety, the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era. In 1956–61 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford; his lectures were popular with students and faculty and served as the basis of his 1962 prose collection The Dyer's Hand.
From around 1927 to 1939 Auden and Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship while both had briefer but more intense relations with other men. In 1939 Auden fell in love with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage; this ended in 1941 when Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship, and from 1947 until Auden's death they lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation, often collaborating on opera libretti such as The Rake's Progress, for music by Igor Stravinsky.
Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential, and critical views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as in Joseph Brodsky's claim that he had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century." After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues," Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.
“If you want romance, fuck a journalist.”
“Acts of injustice doneBetween the setting and the rising sunIn history lie like bones, each one.”
“In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948)”
“The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.”
“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”
“On był moją Północą, Wschodem i Zachodem,Był Południem, dniem pracy, niedzielnym ogrodem,Księżycem, porą nocy; w nim pieśń i rozmowa.Myślałem: miłość przetrwa wieki. Złudne słowa.Po co mi gwiazdy teraz, każdą zgaś z księżycem.Wyrzuć ocean, a słońce rozbij na mgławicę,Wylej ocean, wymieć lasy z drzew, spal zboże,Bo teraz nic już dobrze skończyć się nie może.”
“There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.”
“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executivesWould never want to tamper, flows on southFrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,A way of happening, a mouth.”
“Oh dear white children, casual as birds,Playing among the ruined languages,So small beside their large confusing words.”
“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.”
“Shall memory restoreThe steps and the shore,The face and the meeting place;”
“You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.”
“Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.”
“The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.”
“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”
“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.”
“The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.”
“Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded.”
“The sky is darkening like a stainSomething is going to fall like rainAnd it won't be flowers”
“Organic growth is a cyclical process; it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.”
“People always get what they want. But there is a price for everything. Failures are either those who do not know what they want or are not prepared to pay the price asked them. The price varies from individual to individual. Some get things at bargain-sale prices, others only at famine prices. But it is no use grumbling. Whatever price you are asked, you must pay.”
“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.”
“No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.”
“Far from his illnessThe wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;By mourning tonguesThe death of the poet was kept from his poems.”
“Lovers of small numbers go benignly potty,Believe all tales are thirteen chapters long,Have animal doubles, carry pentagrams,Are Millerites, Baconians, Flat-Earth-Men.Lovers of big numbers go horribly mad,would have the Swiss abolished, all of usWell-purged, somatotyped, baptised, taught baseball:They empty bars, spoil parties, run for Congress.”
“As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street,The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat.And down by the brimming river I heard a lover singUnder an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending.'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet,And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street,'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dryAnd the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.”
“About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters; how well, they understoodIts human position; how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgotThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree.In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
“Defenceless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages:May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame.”
“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 abhorrenceIf I caught anyone preferring ArtTo Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart.I lived with crooks but seldom was molested;The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.”
“Let all your thinks be thanks.”
“We must love one another or die”
“A.E.Housman'No one, not even Cambridge was to blame(Blame if you like the human situation):Heart-injured in North London, he becameThe Latin Scholar of his generation.Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;Food was his public love, his private lustSomething to do with violence and the poor.In savage foot-notes on unjust editionsHe timidly attacked the life he led,And put the money of his feelings onThe uncritical relations of the dead,Where only geographical divisionsParted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.”
“But round your image there is no fog, and the Earthcan still astonish.”
“Like love we don't know where or whyLike love we cant compel or flyLike Love we often weepLike Love we seldom keep”
“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.”
“If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.”
“For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.”
“Like everyone else, I have my black list of unfavorite authors and critics, and among intimate friends I sometimes say exactly what I think of them, but I have the feeling that to express my opinions publicly would be in bad taste, that, to people whom one does not know personally, one should speak only of the authors and critics one is fond of. I find reading savage reviews like reading pornography; though I often enjoy them, I feel a bit ashamed of myself for doing so. Still, I must admit that I find Nietzsche's list of his "impracticals" great fun.”
“As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like.For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.”
“The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.”
“And none will hear the postman’s knockWithout a quickening of the heart.For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”
“Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts.”
“The nightingales are sobbing inThe orchards of our mothers,And hearts that we broke long agoHave long been breaking others;Tears are round, the sea is deep:Roll them overboard and sleep. ”
“Beauty, midnight, vision dies:Let the winds of dawn that blowSoftly round your dreaming headSuch a day of welcome showEye and knocking heart may bless,Find our mortal world enough;Noons of dryness find you fedBy the involuntary powers,Nights of insult let you passWatched by every human love.”
“Drama is based on the Mistake.”
“The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.”
“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.”
“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”
“Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.”
“The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrewsNot to be born is the best for manThe second best is a formal orderThe dance's pattern, dance while you can.Dance, dance, for the figure is easyThe tune is catching and will not stopDance till the stars come down from the raftersDance, dance, dance till you drop.”