457 Quotes by W. H. Auden

He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Man is a tempted being, living with what he does and suffers in time, the medium in which he realizes his potential character. The indeterminacy of time means that events never happen once and for all. The good may fall, the bad may repent, and suffering can be, not a simple retribution, but a triumph.

All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.

Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seemAbrupt, untrained, competing with no lieOur fathers shouted once.

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.

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:The parish of rich women, physical decay,Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,For poetry makes nothing happen: it survivesIn the valley of its making where executivesWould never want to tamper, flows on southFrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,A way of happening, a mouth.