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.
“In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise”
“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.”
“All we are not stares back at what we are.”
“Healing is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”
“Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.”
“Warm are the still and lucky miles,White shores of longing stretch away,A light of recognition fillsThe whole great day, and brightThe tiny world of lovers' arms.Silence invades the breathing woodWhere drowsy limbs a treasure keep,Now greenly falls the learned shadeAcross the sleeping browsAnd stirs their secret to a smile.Restored! Returned! The lost are borneOn seas of shipwreck home at last:See! In a fire of praising burnsThe dry dumb past, and weOur life-day long shall part no more.”
“Lay your sleeping head, my love,Human on my faithless arm;”
“Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.”
“The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.”
“I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?”
“A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. 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', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.”
“The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.”
“Beloved, we are always in the wrong,Handling so clumsily our stupid lives, Suffering too little or too long,Too careful even in our selfish loves:The decorative manias we obeyDie in grimaces round us every day,Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voiceWhich utters an absurd command - Rejoice. ”
“Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.”
“Poetry makes nothing happen.”
“O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.”
“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.”
“You owe it to all of us to get on with what you're good at.”
“I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.”
“Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire; Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire. ”
“Some thirty inches from my noseThe frontier of my Person goes,And all the untilled air betweenIs private pagus or demesne.Stranger, unless with bedroom eyesI beckon you to fraternize,Beware of rudely crossing it:I have no gun, but I can spit.”
“All I have is a voice.”
“A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.”
“There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.”
“Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.”
“Time will say nothing but I told you so,Time only knows the price we have to pay;If I could tell you I would let you know.”
“Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drumBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overheadScribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
“For the error bred in the bone of each woman and each man craves what it cannot have, not universal love but to be loved alone.”
“The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.”
“Nature and Passion are powerful, but they are also full of grief. True happiness would have the calm and order of bourgeois routine without its utilitarian ignobility and boredom.”
“What living occasion can,Be just to the absent?”
“We were put on this earth to make things. ”
“I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.”
“Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think”
“Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say”
“A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.”
“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.”
“Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.”
“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.”
“The friends who met here and embraced are gone,Each to his own mistake;”
“Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.”
“There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.”
“Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.”
“My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.”
“Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.”
“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”
“A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.”
“A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.”
“Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.”
“I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.”