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Eagerly, musician,Sweep your string,So we may sing,Elated, optative,Our several voicesInterblending,Playfully contending,Not interferingBut co-inhering,For all withinThe cincture of the soundIs holy ground,Where all are Brothers,None faceless Others. Let mortals bewareOf words, forWith words we lie,Can say peaceWhen we mean war,Foul thought speak fairAnd promise falsely,But song is true:Let music for peaceBe the paradigm,For peace means to changeAt the right time,As the World-Clock,Goes Tick and Tock. So may the storyOf our human cityPresently moveLike music, whenBegotten notesNew notes beget,Making the flowingOf time a growing,Till what it could be,At last it is,Where even sadnessIs a form of gladness,Where Fate is Freedom,Grace and Surprise.
-W. H. Auden
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Actors, Acting
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The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
-W. H. Auden
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Age
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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
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America
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The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
-W. H. Auden
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God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
-W. H. Auden
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Authors & Writing
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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
-W. H. Auden
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No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
-W. H. Auden
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Books
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If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
-W. H. Auden
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Borders
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But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided.
A continent for better or worse divided.
The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.
...penned after Lord Mountbatten entrusted Sir Cyril Radcliffe, with drawing up the boundaries between India & Pakistan.
-W. H. Auden, poem titled Partition
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Cancer
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Cancer is a curious thing...
Nobody knows what the cause is,
Though some pretend they do;
It's like some hidden assassin,
Waiting to strike at you.
Childless women get it,
And men when they retire.
It
-W. H. Auden
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Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire; it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.
-W. H. Auden
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Children
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The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
-W. H. Auden
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Creativity
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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
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Criticism
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The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.
-W. H. Auden
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Criticism should be a casual conversation.
-W. H. Auden
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Death
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The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
-W. H. Auden
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Differences
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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
-W. H. Auden
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Doctors
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A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist.
-W. H. Auden
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Dreams
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A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
-W. H. Auden
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Evil
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
-W. H. Auden
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I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
-W. H. Auden, 1-Sep-39
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Face, Faces
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
-W. H. Auden
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Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility -- the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.
-W. H. Auden
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Faith
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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?
-W. H. Auden
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Fame
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Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
-W. H. Auden
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Books by and about W. H. Auden