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Quote by W. H. Auden

“Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.”

Quote by W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden was a prominent 20th-century poet, celebrated for his innovative and influential poetry. His works frequently delve into themes of love, politics, and the human experience, and he is a pivotal figure in the literary movement known as New Criticism. Born on February 21, 1907, in York, England, Auden passed away on September 29, 1973. more

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“Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. Let not what should be sauce, rather than food for you, engross all your application. Beware of a boundless and sickly appetite for the reading of poems which the nation now swarms withal; and let not the Circaen cup intoxicate you. But especially preserve the chastity of your soul from the dangers you may incur, by a conversation with muses no better than harlots.”

“What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.”