3 December 2020 W. H. Auden 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.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden ‘Healing,’ Papa would tell me, ‘is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.’
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden 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.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that ‘faith’ is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden 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.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden Choice of attention – to pay attention to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
3 December 2020 W. H. Auden Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
