01c. 1920 ADBase words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
02c. 1920 ADno poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
04c. 1920 ADThe 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.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
05c. 1920 ADSome thirty inches from my noseThe frontier of my Person goes,And all the untilled air betweenIs private pagus or demesne.Stranger, unless with bedroom eyesI beckon you to fraternize,Beware of rudely crossing it:I have no gun, but I can spit.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
08c. 1920 ADDrama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
09c. 1920 ADIn the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
10c. 1920 ADIn the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet.", Harper's Magazine, May 1948)W.H. Auden / quote ↗
11c. 1920 ADSo long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
12c. 1920 ADThe true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
13c. 1920 ADWithout art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
14c. 1920 ADThere are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
15c. 1920 ADWe would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
16c. 1920 ADThe friends who met here and embraced are gone,Each to his own mistake;W.H. Auden / quote ↗
18c. 1920 ADWhat is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced society is not, strictly speaking, a political one, that is today, it is not concerned with human beings as persons and citizens, but with human bodies. ... In all technologically advanced countries today, whatever political label they give themselves, their policies have, essentially, the same goal: to guarantee to every member of society, as a psychophysical organism, the right to physical and mental health.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
19c. 1920 ADThere must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
20c. 1920 ADPart came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part.They taught me to express my deep abhorrenceIf I caught anyone preferring ArtTo Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart.I lived with crooks but seldom was molested;The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
21c. 1920 ADWhen someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
22c. 1920 ADIn any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don't think that art that is alive can remain on the same level of interest throughout — and the same is true of life.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
23c. 1920 ADThe identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
24c. 1920 ADAs readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like.For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.W.H. Auden / quote ↗
