Quotes and anectdotes from the wise to the foolish, and the courageous to the drunk
W. H. Auden Poet
Gender: Male
Citizenship: England
Born: Feb 21, 1907
Died: Sep 29, 1973
Wystan Hugh Auden, who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, and is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety in tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.
Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, written in an intense and dramatic tone and in a style that alternated between telegraphic modern and fluent traditional, established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. In the late 1930s he became uncomfortable in this role and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where in 1946 he became an American citizen.
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.
love
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
art, money & sad
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
music
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
art
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
love & Valentine's Day
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
health
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
travel
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
death
A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
art, music & poetry
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
science
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
teacher
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
music