W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Audenwas an English poet, who later became an American citizen. He is 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 was born in York, grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 February 1907
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
ambition men intelligent
Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
mother writing language
Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
marriage two
To make one, there must be two.
relationship goodness easier
Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
men choices attention
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
children hero history
Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
eye writing men
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.
love heart affection
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
evil tables criminal-mind
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
book thank-god alternatives
Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
love passion language-words
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
learning israel evil
I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
art money writing
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.