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Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Mean
Aesthetics
Infallible
Guide
Guides
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Least
Pleasure
Means
Fallible

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In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.
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An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.
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Like love we don't know where or why Like love we cant compel or fly Like Love we often weep Like Love we seldom keep
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
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The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
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A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going to smash They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods. A culture is no better than its woods.
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The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
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There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.
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the child unlucky in his little State, Some hearth where freedom is excluded, A hive whose honey is fear and worry, Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape
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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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There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?
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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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History marched to the drums of a clear idea...
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The stars are not wanted now, put out every one Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun.
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.
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Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
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Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
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Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral
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