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
children book adults
There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.
real book reading
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
prayer attention definitions
The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
math winning peers
How happy 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.
inspirational want genius
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
iceland people passionate
Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.
smell blood eras
I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
art taste twenties
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.
men action life-is
A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.
real feelings quality
If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.
addiction damnation sin
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
work men thinking
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
god usa america
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
thinking two keeping-secrets
You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.