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
W. H. Auden quotes about
prayer unique class
In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
birthday anxiety age
Now is the age of anxiety.
heaven hell slogans
The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
love passion language-words
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
evil tables criminal-mind
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
ambition men intelligent
Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
success patience work
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
leadership joy great-leader
No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
music art thinking
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
eye writing men
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
helping-others love-each-other
Love each other or perish
sensual desire wish
Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
people feelings telling-the-truth
My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
learning israel evil
I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.