Academics From The United States

"And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions."

"There will be time to murder and create."

"The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening."

"In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo."

"Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table."

"A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like school boys..."

"No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest—for it is a part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude."

"The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion."

"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down."

"Long ago I studied the ancient Indian languages, and while I was chiefly interested at that time in philosophy, I read a little poetry too; and I know that my own poetry shows the influence of Indian thought and sensibility."

"Fortunate the man who, at the right moment meets the right friend; fortunate also the man who at the right moment meets the right enemy. I do not approve the extermination of the enemy; the policy of exterminating or, as it is barbarously said, liquidating enemies, is one of the most alarming developments of modern war and peace, from the point of view of those who desire the survival of culture. One needs the enemy... A country within which the divisions have gone too far is a danger to itself: a country which is too well united - whether by nature or by device, by honest purpose or by fraud and oppression - is a menace to others."

"No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.…Poetry…remains one person talking to another....no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic."

"The division between those who accept, and those who deny, Christian revelation I take to be the most profound division between human beings."

"It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it."

"When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way."

"The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards."

"If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph."

"I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me."

"It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

"I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat. My Cat is a Lilliecat Hubvously. What a lilliecat it is. There never was such a Lilliecat. Its Name is and its one Idea is to be Useful!!"

"It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"In terms of English and American poets, it would be quite just to call this The Age of Auden. Not only because Auden was such a dominant and successful poet, but because he went through all the contradictory ideological phases, from Marx to God. He really is representative in that sense."

"Auden was a religious poet in the nature of Herbert-is of this guy shambling along somewhere down lower Manhattan, almost looking like a bum in the way that he's going by, but containing within him a tremendous concern for others. All those big words. Auden could write them because he was a great poet. He could write Pity with a capital "P," and he could write Justice, and the Just. Maybe the authority to write of such emotions and qualities with a capital letter is gone now. But Auden was entitled to do it, and he believed in doing it."

"I sometimes think of Auden's poetry as a hygiene, a knowledge and practice, based on a brilliantly prejudiced analysis of contemporary disorders, relating to the preservation and promotion of health, a sanitary science and a flusher of melancholies. I sometimes think of his poetry as a great war, admire intensely the mature, religious, and logical fighter, and deprecate the boy bushranger."

"He proclaimed so diminished a scope for poetry, including mine. I had little use for his beginnings and middles. Yet he was one of the masters."

"I really wrote in his (Auden's) style. I was crazy about him. I loved his poems so much that I was using this British language all the time—I was saying trousers and subaltern and things like that. You understand I was a Bronx kid. We went through a few poems, and he kept asking me, do you really talk like that? And I kept saying, Oh yeah, well, sometimes. That was the great thing I learned from Auden: that you’d better talk your own language. Then I asked him what young writers now ask me—and I always tell them this story—I said to Auden, Well, do you think I should keep writing? He laughed and then became very solemn. If you’re a writer, he said, you’ll keep writing no matter what. That’s not a question a writer should ask. Something like that, not exactly, but close."

"Wystan Auden read us some of his new poem in the evening...I follow Auden in his derision of patriotism, class distinctions, comfort, and all the ineptitudes of the middle-classes. But when he also derides the other soft little harmless things which make my life comfortable, I feel a chill autumn wind. I feel that were I a communist the type of person whom I should most wish to attack would not be the millionaire or the imperialist, but the soft, reasonable, tolerant, secure, self-satisfied intellectuals like Vita and myself. A man like Auden with his fierce repudiation of half-way houses and his gentle integrity makes one feel terribly discontented with one’s own smug successfulness. I go to bed feeling terribly Edwardian and back-number, and yet, thank God, delighted that people like Wystan Auden should actually exist."

"He is all ice and woodenfaced acrobatics."

"His satire has been criticized at times as irresponsible : this is to misunderstand its motive and aim: in so far as it proceeds from the life of one social class, a class which has lost its responsibility and civilizing impetus, the terms of this satire are bound to be superficially irresponsible. But no contemporary writing shows so clearly the revulsion of the artist from a society which can no longer support him, his need to identify himself with a class that can provide for his imagination."

"As the poet W. H. Auden wrote: "Truth, like love and sleep, resents/Approaches that are too intense." I call this Auden's rule."

"W. H. Auden's poem, Spain, is fit to stand beside great predecessors in its moving, yet serene expression of contemporary feeling towards the heart-rending events of the political world. The theme of the poem lies in the comparison between the secular achievements of the past and the hope which is possible for the future with the horrors of the present and the sacrifices which perhaps it demands from those of this generation who think and feel rightly."

"Auden is something of an intellectual jackdaw, picking up bright pebbles of ideas so as to fit them into exciting conceptual patterns."

"The poet Auden said, "Thousands have lived without love; none without water." Ninety-seven percent of Earth's water is ocean. No blue, no green. If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system."

"We have one poet of genius in Auden who is able to write prolifically, carelessly and exquisitely, nor does he seem to have to pay any price for his inspiration. It is as if he worked under the influence of some mysterious drug, which presents him with a private vision, a mastery of form and vocabulary."

"Spain is a hundred line poem from Auden; it is good medium Auden in a good cause — the Spanish Medical Aid. The Marxian theory of history does not go very happily into verse, but the conclusion is very fine."

"In a century of the symbolist, surreal, and absurd, W. H. Auden is essentially a poet of the reasonable."

"Water is the soul of the earth."

"No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him."

"Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic."

"Music is the best means we have of digesting time."

"Minus times minus equals plus, The reason for this we need not discuss."

"A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep."

"We are all on earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for, I can't imagine."

"Now is the age of anxiety."

"Love each other or perish."

"My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain."

"As a poet—not as a citizen—there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption. When it’s corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and this leads to violence."

"A real book reads us."

"Art is born of humiliation."