"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."
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Academics from EnglandAcademics from the United StatesLiterary criticsPoets from the United StatesEducators from the United States
Original Language: English
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Grace Paley, interviewed by Jonathan Dee, Barbara Jones and Larissa MacFarquhar, "Grace Paley, The Art of Fiction No. 131", The Paris Review, No. 124 (Fall 1992)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/W._H._Auden
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