SubscribeW.H. Auden Love Quotes and Sayings
Posted on Oct 15, 2008 under Anglo American Poet, W, W.H. Auden, Writer, Wystan Hugh Auden | No CommentW.H. Auden Love Quotes and Sayings
1. Love each other or perish.
2. 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.
3. I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
4. If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Wystan Hugh Auden ( /ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.
Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. 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.
He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably “Funeral Blues” (“Stop all the clocks”) and “September 1, 1939″, became widely known through films, broadcasts and popular media.
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Sayings by W.H. Auden
1. A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
2. 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.
3. A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
4. 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.
5. Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
6. Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
7. Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
8. 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.
9. Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.
10. Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say.
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