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W. H. Auden

Read through the most famous quotes from W. H. Auden




Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.


— W. H. Auden


#aristocracy #contemporary #every #fallen #feels

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.


— W. H. Auden


#characters #concerned #don quixote #ego #every

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.


— W. H. Auden


#him #makes #often #proud #seldom

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.


— W. H. Auden


#evil #good #imagine

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.


— W. H. Auden


#health #medicine #nothing #say #state

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.


— W. H. Auden


#enter #good #hemingway #his #into

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.


— W. H. Auden


#because #get #i #jobs #looks

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.


— W. H. Auden


#each #equal #member #person #perspective

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.


— W. H. Auden


#double #him #like #may #most

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.


— W. H. Auden


#direction #good #good deal #know #lies






About W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden Quotes




Did you know about W. H. Auden?

By the time of Auden's death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman. " Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer but his passion for words had already begun. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams whom he had met in 1937 partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life.

After his death some of his poems notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") "Musée des Beaux Arts" "Refugee Blues" "The Unknown Citizen" and "September 1 1939" became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films broadcasts and popular media. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings. Wystan Hugh Auden (pron.

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