W.H. Auden Quotes: 16

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

  New Year Letter

• 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.

  Selected Poems

• 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 forever: I was wrong.

  Collected Poems

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

  The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948

• You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

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

  The Dyer's Hand

• If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.

• We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.

  The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

• I will love you forever"swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday"- Is that still as easy?

• O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.

  As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks & Other Light Verse

• There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.

• Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise.

  Another Time

• I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

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

• Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.

  Selected Essays

• The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.