Quotes by W. H. Auden

About W. H. Auden:

Wystan Hugh Auden 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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

W. H. Auden

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

W. H. Auden

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

W. H. Auden

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

W. H. Auden

Now is the age of anxiety.

W. H. Auden

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

W. H. Auden

Art is born of humiliation.

W. H. Auden

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

W. H. Auden

It's 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.

W. H. Auden

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

W. H. Auden

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

W. H. Auden

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.

W. H. Auden

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

W. H. Auden

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

W. H. Auden

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

W. H. Auden

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

W. H. Auden

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

W. H. Auden

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

W. H. Auden

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

W. H. Auden

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

W. H. Auden

Author Bio

  • NameW. H. Auden
  • DescriptionAnglo-American poet
  • BornFebruary 21, 1907
  • DiedSeptember 28, 1973
  • CountryUnited Kingdom; United States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Screenwriter; Literary Historian; Playwright; Writer; Librettist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Austrian State Prize For European Literature; Bollingen Prize; Pulitzer Prize For Poetry; National Book Award; Queen's Gold Medal For Poetry