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.
“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,The desert sighs in the bed,And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.”
“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
“How happy is 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.”
“Small tyrants, threatened by big,sincerely believethey love liberty.”
“The More Loving OneLooking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast.How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return?If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.Admirer as I think I amOf stars that do not give a damn,I cannot, now I see them, sayI missed one terribly all day.Were all stars to disappear or die,I should learn to look at an empty skyAnd feel its total dark sublime,Though this might take me a little time.”
“There is no such thing as the StateAnd no one exists alone;Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.”
“How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return?If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.”
“I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.”
“Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise.”
“The Three Wiseman:The weather has been awful,The countryside is dreary,Marsh, jungle, rock; and echoes mock,Calling our hope unlawful; But a silly song can help alongYours ever and sincerely: At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners,that this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners,and miss our wives, our books, our dogs,but have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are.To discover how to be human nowIs the reason we follow this star.”
“Sorry, my dear, one mustn't be bohemian!”
“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”
“When I try to imagine a faultless loveOr the life to come, what I hear is the murmurOf underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.”
“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.”
“The Ogre does what ogres can,Deeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach:The Ogre cannot master speech.About a subjugated plain,Among its desperate and slain,The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,While drivel gushes from his lips.”
“A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”
“Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,And do not listen to those critics everWhose crude provincial gullets crave in booksPlain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.”
“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
“Evil is unspectacular and always human,And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....”
“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
“SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night.Accurate scholarship canUnearth the whole offenceFrom Luther until nowThat has driven a culture mad,Find what occurred at Linz,What huge imago madeA psychopathic god:I and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn,Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.Exiled Thucydides knewAll that a speech can sayAbout Democracy,And what dictators do,The elderly rubbish they talkTo an apathetic grave;Analysed all in his book,The enlightenment driven away,The habit-forming pain,Mismanagement and grief:We must suffer them all again.Into this neutral airWhere blind skyscrapers useTheir full height to proclaimThe strength of Collective Man,Each language pours its vainCompetitive excuse:But who can live for longIn an euphoric dream;Out of the mirror they stare,Imperialism's faceAnd the international wrong.Faces along the barCling to their average day:The lights must never go out,The music must always play,All the conventions conspireTo make this fort assumeThe furniture of home;Lest we should see where we are,Lost in a haunted wood,Children afraid of the nightWho have never been happy or good.The windiest militant trashImportant Persons shoutIs not so crude as our wish:What mad Nijinsky wroteAbout DiaghilevIs true of the normal heart;For the error bred in the boneOf each woman and each manCraves what it cannot have,Not universal loveBut to be loved alone.From the conservative darkInto the ethical lifeThe dense commuters come,Repeating their morning vow;'I will be true to the wife,I'll concentrate more on my work,'And helpless governors wakeTo resume their compulsory game:Who can release them now,Who can reach the dead,Who can speak for the dumb?All I have is a voiceTo undo the folded lie,The romantic lie in the brainOf the sensual man-in-the-streetAnd the lie of AuthorityWhose buildings grope the sky:There is no such thing as the StateAnd no one exists alone;Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.Defenseless 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.”
“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”