Poet W H Auden Quotes

#1. As English poet W.H. Auden put it in "Apropos of Many Things": "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.

Richard Rohr

#2. A culture," the poet W. H. Auden observed, "is no better than its woods.

Chris Hedges

#3. As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.

W. H. Auden

#4. Does this current deterioration and corruption of language, imprecision of thought, and so forth scare you - or is it just a decadent phase?

AUDEN

It terrifies me. I try by my personal example to fight it; as I say, it's a poet's role to maintain the sacredness of language.

W. H. Auden

#5. 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

#6. The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

W. H. Auden

#7. 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

#8. A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

W. H. Auden

#9. Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

W. H. Auden

#10. The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

W. H. Auden

#11. The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing?

W. H. Auden

#12. no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

W. H. Auden

#13. To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.

W. H. Auden

#14. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

W. H. Auden

#15. No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

W. H. Auden

#16. Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.

W. H. Auden

#17. A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

W. H. Auden

#18. A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

W. H. Auden

#19. In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

Stephen Greenblatt

#20. A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.

W. H. Auden

#21. Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.

W. H. Auden

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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?

W. H. Auden

#25. A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

W. H. Auden

#26. 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.

W. H. Auden

#27. You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

W. H. Auden

#28. A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

W. H. Auden

#29. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

W. H. Auden

#30. Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.

Cynthia Ozick