English-born poet (1907-1973)
The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
W. H. AUDEN
"Reading", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters.
W. H. AUDEN
Musee des Beaux Arts
Hunger allows no choice.
W. H. AUDEN
"September 1, 1939", Selected Poems
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.
W. H. AUDEN
"The Poet & the City", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
W. H. AUDEN
The Complete Works of W. H. Auden
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
W. H. AUDEN
"Refugee Blues", Selected Poems
All we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN
"The Sea and the Mirror"
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
W. H. AUDEN
"Epitaph on a Tyrant"
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
W. H. AUDEN
"In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. AUDEN
"Squares and Oblongs", Poets at Work
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.
W. H. AUDEN
"The More Loving One"
To ask the hard question is simple,
The simple act of the confused will.
W. H. AUDEN
"To Ask the Hard Question is Simple", Poems
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
W. H. AUDEN
The Age of Anxiety
Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods.
W. H. AUDEN
"The Virgin & the Dynamo", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
W. H. AUDEN
"A Poet of the Actual", Forewords and Afterwords
Evil is unspectacular and always human
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. AUDEN
"Herman Melville"
Let us honour if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
W. H. AUDEN
"Dedication to Christopher Isherwood", Poems
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. AUDEN
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
W. H. AUDEN
"A Poet of the Actual", Forewords and Afterwords
Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them -- the one, in fact, which is not a mask.
W. H. AUDEN
"One of the Family", Forewords and Afterwords