Top 37 Auden Poetry Quotes
#1. But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
W. H. Auden
#2. Auden? Does he rhyme? I only like poetry that rhymes. All
the best poets write in rhyme."
"Really?"
"Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare. You can't do better than that.
Shiela Jane
#3. Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
W. H. Auden
#4. What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
W. H. Auden
#5. The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
George Orwell
#6. no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
W. H. Auden
#7. When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.
Tom Stoppard
#9. Proper names are poetry in the raw.
Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. Auden
#10. For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
W. H. Auden
#11. As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play the music in spite of that.
Philip Pullman
#12. Although you be, as I am, one of those
Who feel a Christian ought to write in prose,
For poetry is magic: born in sin, you
May read it to exorcies the Gentile in you.
W. H. Auden
#13. Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
W. H. Auden
#14. A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden
#15. There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.
W. H. Auden
#16. A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. Auden
#17. Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. Auden
#18. 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.
W. H. Auden
#19. Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
W. H. Auden
#20. Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
Carol Ann Duffy
#21. With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse
W. H. Auden
#22. O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.
W. H. Auden
#23. I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.
Stevie Smith
#24. Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.
W. H. Auden
#25. One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
Clive James
#26. You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
W. H. Auden
#27. Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.
W. H. Auden
#28. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton
W. H. Auden
#29. My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.
W. H. Auden
#30. The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
W. H. Auden
#31. 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.
W. H. Auden
#32. In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.
W. H. Auden
#33. A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.
W. H. Auden
#34. Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden
#35. I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.
J. Courtney Sullivan
#37. Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.
Peter Porter
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