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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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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Now is the age of anxiety.
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We are all here on earth to help others what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
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One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.
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It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
W. H. Auden
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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.
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All pity is self-pity.
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No being can make another one happy.
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The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.
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Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.
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And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
W. H. Auden
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Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
W. H. Auden
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A shilling life will give you all the facts.
W. H. Auden
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You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.
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One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved. Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
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Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
W. H. Auden
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Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.
W. H. Auden
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Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.
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It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.
W. H. Auden