Auden Quotes

• Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

  W. H. Auden

  Hurt, Mad, Ireland

  "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" l. 32 (1940)

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• We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.

  Kathleen Norris

  Christian, Religious, Views

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• A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." - W. H. Auden
  "A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

  Robert Frost

  Believe, Sound, Poet

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• Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

  Carol Ann Duffy

  Opposites, Wonder, Said

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• Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being as W.H. Auden said "the clear expression of mixed feelings" to nonsense verse.

  Stephen Dunn

  Feelings, Say Anything, Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Soyinka's Death at Dawn, Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts, Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning and Wislawa Szymborska's Some People come to mind immediately. But there are plenty, plenty more that I enjoy.

  Ama Ata Aidoo

  Art, People, Mind

  Source: girdblog.com

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• I think it was W.H. Auden who said he was lucky that his first favorite poet was Thomas Hardy, who was a good but not a great poet, because if you are exposed to the greats too soon it can just squash you as a writer.

  David Duchovny

  Thinking, Squash, Lucky

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Interview with Joshua Wolf Shenk, www.motherjones.com. May 2005.

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• The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

  George Orwell

  Water, Poetry, Literature

  The Road toWigan Pier ch. 11 (1937)

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• One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.

  Clive James

  Poetry, Trying, Literature

  Clive James (2014). “Poetry Notebook: 2006–2014”, p.130, Pan Macmillan

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• Auden, who asked two things of an imagined world-that it be somehow like ours and somehow unlike-would be Ben Marcus's ideal reader, yet even without the poet's dire program, I am altogether taken by this hilarious and sexy alternative universe. Just imagine! it is all done with words instead of mirrors, so much more reliable and so much more heartbreaking. Thus Prospero enthralls his crew.

  Richard Howard

  Sexy, Taken, Mirrors

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• Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Book, Beer, Names

  Richard Rodriguez (2003). “Brown: The Last Discovery of America”, p.17, Penguin

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• There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.

  Randall Jarrell

  Attitude, Doubt, Might

  "The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry" (p. 131), 1969.

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• The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead.

  Michael Jackson

  Horse, Love Is, Tree

  Michael Jackson (2004). “In Sierra Leone”, p.140, Duke University Press

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• I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.

  Stevie Smith

  Thinking

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• You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.

  Nick Cave

  Book, Fall, Hands

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• The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish’.

  Mitch Albom

  Caring, Love Is, Support And Love

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• ‎W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is--and always will be--ourselves.

  Ian Mortimer

  Country, Mean, Past

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

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Phrases, World, Poet

  Stephen Greenblatt (2011). “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”, p.13, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

  Peter Porter

  Accomplished

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• When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Hypnosis, Secret

  "Martin Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 151". Interview with Francesca Riviere, www.theparisreview.org. 1998.

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• I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

  J. Courtney Sullivan

  Night, Heartache, Littles

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• The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had.

  Sylvia Plath

  Moving, Weather, White

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.73, Anchor

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• Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here.

  Nick Cave

  Beautiful, Children, Block

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