W.H. Auden

"Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before."

"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."

"“SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad,Find what occurred at Linz,What huge imago made A psychopathic god:I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn,Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy,And what dictators do,The elderly rubbish they talk To 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 air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man,Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse:But who can live for long In an euphoric dream;Out of the mirror they stare,Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day:The lights must never go out,The music must always play,All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home;Lest we should see where we are,Lost in a haunted wood,Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish:What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart;For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have,Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come,Repeating their morning vow;'I will be true to the wife,I'll concentrate more on my work,'And helpless governors wake To 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 voice To undo the folded lie,The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky:There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone;Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages:May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair,Show an affirming flame.”"

"“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”"

"“The More Loving One Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With 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 am Of stars that do not give a damn,I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die,I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime,Though this might take me a little time.”"

"“Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. 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.”"

"“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”"

"All I have is a voice."

"Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality . . . and by the sharpness of their insights. . . . But with successive readings one’s doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one’s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn to an equally exaggerated aversion. Of all such writers, one might say that one cannot imagine them as children. The more we read them, the more we become aware that something has gone badly wrong with their affective life; . . . it is not only impossible to imagine one of them as a happy husband or wife, it is impossible to imagine their having a single intimate friend to whom they could open their hearts."

"A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue."

"The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in."

"“If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.”"

"I have never, I think, wanted to 'belong' to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resented exclusion. Why should thet accept me? All I have ever asked is that others should go their way and let me go mine."

"Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings."

"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."

"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."

"In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag."

"We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of no account."

"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."

"Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered."