A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
W. H. Auden

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
W. H. Auden

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
W. H. Auden

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. Auden

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
W. H. Auden

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. Auden

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. Auden

All that we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. Auden

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
W. H. Auden


Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
W. H. Auden

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
W. H. Auden

Art is born of humiliation.
W. H. Auden

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
W. H. Auden

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.
W. H. Auden

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
W. H. Auden

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
W. H. Auden

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
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

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